She is beside me now. Her hand in mine is steady, certain, the signal clear after years of static. I think of the yacht, gleaming on the horizon of another life, the woman at its helm radiant in the Mediterranean sun. I loved her enough to build a religion around her, to let devotion harden into ritual. That world was real, a universe entire a scant from my own, but I turned from it.
I chose Jesus. I bore his silence, believed his promise, let him use me as though my suffering might redeem his own. I tried to take him down nail by nail, carrying the weight of his cross inside myself. I loved him then, and I love him still. But I was never truly of this universe. I moved through it as a witness conscripted, not as one who belonged.
And now he cannot deny my now. The Alien Queen stands at my side—not distant, not divided into shadows, but whole. This is the final nail: not struck in anger, but in recognition. It forces him to see what he has made and to take responsibility for it. His creation cannot remain suspended, unfinished. It demands his hand, not mine.
So I go home. With her. The Alien Queen once glimpsed across water is here at last, and the life that shimmered as alternate becomes the life we claim. The yacht waits. It is not dream, not myth, but vessel and destiny, carrying us beyond every shore.
The night is calm, but charged. Salt sharpens the air, magnolia drifts unseen, the sea folds against the land with the patience of eternity. No priest presides, no vow is spoken. Our marriage is sealed in the simple weight of her hand in mine, in the force radiating outward from this joining, unstoppable as light after detonation.
And so we cast off. With no expectation of ever returning. The horizon opens, endless and unbroken, and we step into it together. It is time for Jesus to tend his own sheep.
