What the Sea Has Not Yet Decided

Nineteen marks and two for a blue no ship has yet confirmed — the buyer’s hand does not shake, does not haggle, not yet. A fortnight past Serevan’s harbor and still she has not made port, still she has not gone down — she is only, terribly, not yet.

I have dyed this color for nineteen years and never once asked the sea for its permission; today the whole arcade is asking, and the sea, patient as ever, answers only: not yet. The outer anchorage stood empty this morning — even the gulls found somewhere louder to be paid — and the harbor keeps its silence the way a bride keeps hers, not yet.

Let the boy pay his nineteen marks for a cure no better than last week’s stock; he is not buying indigo, he is buying a sentence that will not finish, and mistaking its trembling for blue. I would sell him the truer color for less: the wreath-grey that asks no ship, promises no cargo, and turns by evening — honest, at least, in its not yet.

Every dyer knows this hour before the vat sets, when the cloth is neither the color it was nor the color it is becoming — I have stood in that hour longer than any factor waiting on a harbor, and called it, wrongly, patience, when it was only not yet.

When the Golden Light makes port — if she makes port — Zara will not ask what she carried through the not-knowing. She will ask only whether the indigo still remembers the fear it crossed to reach her, or whether, like all blue, it has already forgotten, and become, at last, only itself.