This is the testament of a man who has lived the sailor’s cycle as it was for centuries: — Ian James Hillyard

Good luck with your memoir. I hope your experience of dying right now isn't you dying right now.

But if so I'd much rather have companions to talk to in that situation, rather than not.

Your emphasis on the sailors life makes me think of Moby Dick. Especially as here you are talking of your memoir.

Is this what you had in mind with Moby Dick? (half only:


CHAPTER FOUR: The Drunkard and the Student
Setting: The North Atlantic, 1604
Theme: Majaz (Illusion) vs Haqiqa (Truth through Disguise)
“The Self is a Sea, boundless and measureless.
It is not a thing you can Seek, but a reality you Awaken to.”
— Ibn Arabi
When in the middle of the sea, even lies float like a tree.

‘In which the ocean does not roar, but leans heavy on the soul—and a ship arrives not to
save anyone, but to survive’

It was the kind of afternoon that stripped men bare.
No lightning. No storm. Just the slow weight of the Atlantic pushing down on the world—sky and sea both the colour of old pewter. The wind came from the west—not a gale, but steady, insistent, like a long-held breath with nowhere left to go.
This was the North Atlantic in its purest mood. Endless. Impersonal. Majestic and malignant in equal measure.
Salt laced the air like old grief. It caught in the throat, clung to the eyes, soaked the canvas until the sails hung thick and heavy with it. The ocean rolled beneath, not wild, but powerful—long slow swells that didn’t break, only rose and fell with the rhythm of something ancient, older than maps and deeper than memory.
There was no land in sight.
Only the ship.
She came through the mist like a thought remembered too late. Low in the water. Her wake was short, her motion deliberate. She wasn’t new, and she didn’t try to pretend otherwise. Her timbers were seasoned, her rigging taut, and her lines sharp as a promise.
She was a brigantine—square-rigged on the foremast, fore-and-aft on the main. Spanish-born in the year of our Lord 1559, christened La Bella Reina and built for speed and war in the Basque yards. She’d flown the Cross of Burgundy once, proud and painted, but that changed when the English took her off the Azores—back when Elizabeth still wore the crown and the oceans ran red with privateers.
Now she was called The Inconstant.
A name half-spat and half-prayed, never spoken lightly by the men who sailed her. She had seen battles, storms, pestilence, mutiny, and miracles. She had been blessed by fire and cursed by saints. She bore no saints now—only salt scars and the smell of pitch.
Her deck was narrow, her masts tall. Her yards creaked with the soft sound of trust—not weakness, but age. Ropes hissed with the ship’s motion, and the sails beat a rhythm older than drums.
This was not a ship of glory.
This was a ship of endurance.

‘In which a man with no name steers a ship with no saints, and a man with a ledger learns the price of asking too many questions’

Below decks, the smell was thick—oak, brine, smoke, sweat, and oil. The smell of honest labour. Of men living close together and still somehow apart. Hammocks swayed above the creaking floorboards. The bilge sloshed. Lanterns swung. No one spoke loudly unless they wanted the whole ship to hear.
Above, near the helm, stood a man.
Not a captain—not anymore. Not a mate, though he’d held the rank in better years. Not even officially crew. Just a man who had been aboard so long that no one remembered him not being there.
He wasn’t in the ship’s books.
But he stood the helm like it was part of him—and that was enough.
The crew respected him. That meant more than a name on paper. At sea, some men are written in ink. Others, in salt and sail. He was one of the latter.
He didn’t speak much, but when he did, it was to call sail or offer quiet guidance—not barked orders, just the kind of voice that made men listen without knowing why. His hands were steady. His posture unshaken. And the ship knew him. Every line, every groan of the hull, every whisper in the rigging seemed to meet him halfway.
Below decks, they told stories about him. That he could read the wind before it came. That he once sailed through a gale with nothing but instinct and a broken compass. No one claimed to know his name. Some said they did once, but it had been worn smooth by the years.
He didn’t eat with the officers, nor sleep with the deckhands. He simply… was. A fixed point in the shifting universe of the ship.
And that made him a problem for the Purser.
A thin, fussy man, the Purser moved like spilled ink—fast, staining everything he touched. He clutched his ledger like a holy book and treated the crew like numbers in a ledger he never balanced.
He didn’t understand the ocean.
He didn’t understand her people.
And worst of all—he didn’t try.
He sniffed around corners, muttered about “irregularities,” questioned the quartermaster, questioned the bosun. And always—always—his pale little eyes came back to the man at the helm.
“He’s not on the books,” he’d whisper.
“He’s drawing no rations. He’s not on any payroll.”
The crew warned him.
Quietly, at first. Then not so quietly.
You don’t question the wheel.
You don’t poke holes in the hull to see if it leaks.
And you don’t go nosing after a man who keeps your ship upright when the stars go hiding.
The helmsman never noticed.
He wasn’t interested in ledgers. Or credit and debit. Or bureaucratic suspicion.
He lived in rope tension and wind shape. He had no time for a man who thought the world could be measured in ink and flour.
And then, one night, the Purser disappeared.
No splash. No scream. Just… gone. One moment pacing the deck with his brows furrowed and his lips thin with indignation—and the next, not.
No alarm was raised.
By morning, no one asked where he was. A mug of tea sat cooling in the galley. His bunk was made. His book lay open to a page with nothing on it.
The Captain said nothing to the crew. He simply took the ship’s books into his cabin, closed the door, and emerged an hour later. A page had been updated.
Beside the Purser’s name, in a small, precise hand, were two letters:
D.D.
Discharged. Dead.
Or as the crew said it, with a shrug and a shared glance:
Damn Disappeared.
And so the ship sailed on. The decks scrubbed. The watch changed. The wind shifted.
The helmsman stood at his post as he always had—hands on the wheel, eyes to the horizon.
He never asked where the Purser had gone.
He hadn’t even noticed he was there.

In which a captain watches the horizon and wonders how a ship can belong to a man who was never written down.

Down in the hold, tucked behind crates of dried goods, between the barrels of salted pork and sacks of flour, the boy had carved out a kingdom of one. It was dark, always, and it smelled of brine, burlap, and something halfway between bread and mildew. But to him, it was sanctuary. The sacks made soft enough walls, the crates a roof. There was even a little slit in the wood above where a thread of daylight could sneak through, marking time like a sundial in dust.
Here, no one asked him to scrub decks or coil ropes. No one barked orders or thumped the back of his head for dawdling. He had a chipped tin cup, a book without a cover, and a stub of pencil that he guarded like treasure. This was the only world he could call his own.
But then—
Eight bells.
The sound cracked through the hold like a pistol shot. Four o’clock. Afternoon watch over. And with it came the terrible memory—the captain’s tea.
“Hell’s teeth!” he muttered, scrambling to his feet. He banged his elbow on a crate and bit his lip to keep from crying out. The captain’s tea wasn’t a task. It was a trust. A ritual. Miss it, and it wasn’t just the captain’s displeasure he'd face—it was the stewards.
He ran. Through the dark. Up the first ladder, then the second. Past the galley where the cook was cursing the scullion for over-boiling the potatoes. The galley door creaked as he burst through, nearly losing his footing on the greasy floorboards.
The steward stood there, arms folded, lips pinched like he’d just swallowed a lemon whole. He was a man of girth and scowl, apron stiff with starch, and a brow set permanently to disappointed. A creation, it seemed, of vinegar and Victorian disapproval.
“You’re late,” the steward said flatly, not even bothering to look at him.
“I know, Mr Hodges, I—”
“Save it.” He turned with exaggerated slowness and plucked the silver tray from the sideboard, where a porcelain teapot sat beside two matching cups and a plate of dry biscuits. “Captain’s tea waits for no boy.”
The boy nodded, head low. He took the tray carefully, hands steady despite the pounding in his chest. The steward sniffed as if doubting the boy’s ability to manage even gravity.
“Don’t slosh it like you did last week,” the steward said, turning away. “He still had biscuit crumbs on his lapel at dinner.”
“I won’t, Mr Hodges.”
He turned toward the companionway ladder, tray in hands, and began the long, careful climb to the captain’s quarters above.
The boy was gone, swept away into the shifting rhythm of the deck, and the captain remained, still and quiet, like a figure carved into the ship itself. Thirty-one years old—young to some, old to others—but for a captain, it was already a kind of twilight. Ambition had slipped from him years ago, not in a blaze, but like smoke leaving a chimney—upward, unnoticed, until it was simply gone.
He’d seen what happened to men who chased too hard. Captains who fought for newer ships, better posts, glory at court. Most of them were ashore now, with nothing but stories and debts to their names. No, not him. He’d kept what mattered.
The Inconstant wasn’t much. She had her age in the groan of her beams and the weary creak of her spars. She had been other things, under other names, and wore the scars of each. But she was his. Not in deed or law, but in bond and burden. She answered to no other hand like she did his. And he knew—quietly, deeply—that many had far less.
He stood at the rail, the weight of his coat settling like a second skin, his eyes wandering the low horizon. The wind toyed with his collar, salt-heavy and playful. He didn’t need to look to know the ship’s mood. He felt it through his boots, through the spine of the deck, through a lifetime spent listening to the voice of rigging and hull.
Something shifted.
Not the sails. Not the sky. Just... something. A breath in the air, a change in the rhythm. Like a thought forming behind a word not yet spoken.
His gaze drifted over the mainmast, then forward, then across the water. The sense tickled his skin.
He didn’t raise his voice.
“Meet her.”
The helmsman, within earshot as always, gave a small nod. No need for ceremony. The captain saw things before they arrived. He read the wind like a script. The helmsman trusted him, as much as any man could trust another made of flesh and salt.
And The Inconstant—tired, beautiful thing—she would meet the wind with him. As she always did.

In which the river rises, the mango falls, and a boy with too much pride mistakes silence for permission.

“Meet her,” the captain said, and the words barely disturbed the wind.
He didn’t need to look. The helmsman would have heard. He always did.
Instead, the captain turned his eyes back to the sea—the wide, shifting thing that never gave its secrets freely. The horizon blurred into mist, soft and pale, like breath on glass. It was a beautiful moment, the kind he rarely allowed himself to feel. But tonight, it came easy. The boy was gone, the deck had settled, and The Inconstant swayed like a cradle under a tired sky.
His thoughts drifted. As they often did, they found the helmsman.
Older than him, surely. Ten years? Maybe twenty? But age didn’t cling to the helmsman like it did to others. He had a timelessness, the kind you found in stone, or storms. The captain had long stopped wondering what year the man was born.
Still, sometimes—quiet moments, when the sails whispered and the hull breathed—the captain pondered the truth. Not the poetry, but the simple fact:
He didn’t know who the helmsman was.
He hadn’t hired him. Hadn’t signed his name. When the Admiralty granted him The Inconstant, the helmsman was already aboard. At the wheel. Not waiting. Not pretending. Just... steering. As if he always had been.
No one questioned it—at first. Only the purser, may he rest, had asked. Just once. Just enough to make the captain feel the weight of it.
Later, when the purser was gone—disappeared one starless night

The captain found himself alone in his cabin, pen in hand, staring down at that empty line. He’d hesitated only a moment, then scratched it in:
D.D.
Discharged. Dead.
He found it interesting that no-one had ever questioned after what had happened, as if The Inconstant herself knew, and nobody cared… even glad?
The captain had made peace with not knowing. The ship answered to the Helmsmen’s hand like she was born to it. In storms and silence, in doldrums and danger, the Helmsman was steady.
And that was enough.
The captain exhaled through his nose, slow and thoughtful. The Inconstant rolled gently under his feet. Not a great ship, but she was his. And the helmsman was part of her. Like the keel. Like the wind. Like the sea itself—ancient, unknowable, and always there.
Still... sometimes, the captain wondered.
Where had the helmsman come from?
And what, in all the wide world, had brought him to this ship?
Wondering—not for the first time—what tricks the light was playing on them all.
Everyone’s attention had shifted now, gently, humorously, to the boy and his sudden cry about sea monsters. A few chuckled. Others rolled their eyes. One or two muttered something about boys and their stories. The old crewman’s hand was still resting on the lad’s shoulder, steadying him like ballast.
Of course, everyone knew there were sea monsters.
They just didn’t talk about them. Not aloud. Not like that.
The kind of men who sailed aboard The Inconstant didn’t make their way to the end of the world without glimpsing something vast, and wrong, and blinking beneath the surface. But it was bad luck to name such things. Bad luck to pretend to know them. Better to scoff, better to joke. Better to blame the light and move along.
Yet there was something in the way the boy had said it—clear and clean, not a trace of performance. No drama. Just wonder. Just belief.
The captain felt it more than heard it: a subtle hush rippling outward, the way oil spreads on water. The boy had touched something. A chord beneath the usual song of sails and wind. Something older.
And of all the men who might have turned their eyes toward the child, only one didn’t.
The helmsman.
He stayed still, hands on the wheel, his back a map of old weather. He had not so much as glanced at the boy. As if he’d heard the cry before. As if he’d expected it.
The captain glanced back at him—just a flick of the eyes. The helmsman’s gaze was fixed on the horizon, steady and empty.
And somewhere, tucked beneath the weight of salt and wood and silence, Lahore stirred again.
The Helmsman stood stock still—
Frozen in time.
“That’s a mere trick of the light, innit?”
The words floated over the deck, soft and harmless to most. But for him, they struck like a bell in the bones.
A mere...
Ameer.
It was nothing, really. Just a phrase. A throwaway bit of sailor’s talk. But it cracked something wide open.
Ameer. A name no one aboard had ever spoken. Not because it was secret—but because it was lost. Forgotten by others, buried by him. A name spoken only in the deepest recesses of memory, back when Lahore had smelled of jasmine and diesel smoke, and his heart still knew how to bleed.
It shattered him. Quietly. Completely.
Because no storm, no distance, no salt or time could ever wash that name clean. No matter how many oceans he crossed or years he piled between himself and the old world, Amir was always there—lurking in the deep.
The pain rushed in like water through a cracked hull, and though his hands never left the wheel, though his face betrayed nothing, inside...
he was drowning.

The Ravi had risen early that year. Not in anger—no, not yet—but with a kind of slow, swollen certainty, as if it had made up its mind to swallow something.
Most of the time, the Ravi was gentle. A curve of water laid across the Punjab like a prayer—wide, slow, generous. It fed mango trees and washed saris, lulled children to sleep and cooled the brows of oxen and men alike. For nine months of the year, it was a river of life—calm, honey-lit, and faithful.
But for the rest, it was not a river at all. It was a god. A moody, furious god with fists of mud and a roar that could drown temples. When the monsoons came, they came like fever dreams, sudden and full of omens. The Ravi swelled beyond her banks and reached for everything. She pulled down walls and children, beasts and breath. When the flood came, it came as a cleansing, and only fools called it unfair.
The village of Kacha Kot, west of Lahore’s crumbling old walls, crouched low beside the river’s edge. Mudbrick homes leaned into one another like old men who’d shared too much smoke and sorrow. The mango trees had just begun to turn heavy with fruit, and the scent of jasmine slipped in between the latticework of windows.
The boy stood on the balcony of his family’s haveli, wrapped in gold-trimmed silk and pride. His turban was too bright. His teeth too white. He smiled too easily.
Everything about him said: this is my world.
The wedding was later that evening.
Below, in the courtyard, preparations had already begun. Clay lamps were being strung between trees. The cooks—borrowed from noble households all across the region—sweated over brass pots, grinding spice into history. The girl moved among them.
She wasn’t supposed to. Not really.
She was too quiet, for one. And too beautiful, for another. She worked with her head down, her sleeves rolled up, the hem of her kameez always damp with water from the well. She was not quite servant, not quite anything. A cousin of someone’s wife. A guest who never left. Her name was spoken rarely and always like an apology.
He had seen her two nights before, carrying mangoes.
She had slipped on the stone steps near the well, and one of the fruits had tumbled, split open on the ground. He had laughed, not cruelly—but not kindly, either.
She looked up. Her eyes didn’t accuse. They forgave.
That was worse.
He gave her another mango from the bowl, and she laughed—quick and surprised, like a gasp in a room full of rules.
That was the beginning.
He was the bridegroom, after all. Promised to a family older than the Mughal court, wealthier than most governors. His wedding would be remembered in poems.
He had done what many boys do when they are told the world belongs to them: he took what he wanted and called it a moment.
The girl never said no.
She never said anything.
But the next morning, she was gone.
They said she had returned to her mother’s village. They said she had been sent to the city. They said she had fallen ill.
But a scarf was found near the Ravi. Bright red once, now dulled by river mud. The kind of red that meant festival, or love, or warnings too late.
He said nothing. No one asked him to.
The wedding went ahead. The bride wore pale gold. The boy drank sweet milk from a silver bowl. The drums played until dawn.
He laughed.
He laughed too loud.
And when no one was looking, he walked barefoot to the riverbank and dropped a single mango into the water.
It floated. Then sank.
He drank the next night. And the night after.
By the time he was twenty-five, no one remembered the kitchen girl. No one but him.
And forty years later, behind the helm of The Inconstant, with salt in his beard and a wind in his eyes, he still sometimes smelled mango, and jasmine, and river mud.
And he never laughed again.

In which a man tries to drink a river dry, and finds at the bottom of the bottle the one thing he cannot swallow.

At first, it was just to sleep.
A little rice liquor at night. Just enough to hush the echoes of mangoes splitting on stone, of bare feet on wet steps, of a scarf too red for coincidence. Just enough to forget that the girl hadn’t said no. That she hadn’t said anything at all. That silence could be consent—or something far worse.
Then it was for the mornings. To get through them. To make tea taste like nothing. To keep his hands from shaking when people said her name like a rumour, like a stain.
Soon, it was just to exist.
To breathe without tasting the river.
To look in the mirror without seeing the child he would never meet.
The child who might have had his smile. Or her silence.
He drank like a man trying to dig a hole through the centre of himself. Not out of celebration. Not even shame.
Out of certainty.
Because he knew—knew—that what he had done could not be undone. That there was no prayer that could lift her from the mud. No fast. No fire. No absolution.
And so he drank.
He drank until his brothers stopped meeting his eyes.
Until his mother started speaking to God more than she spoke to him.
Until even the servants whispered, not with cruelty, but with fear.
The kind of fear you have when someone is dying out loud.
They didn’t cast him out. That would have been too honest.
Instead, they allowed him to fade.
From Lahore to Rawalpindi. Rawalpindi to Multan. A thousand miles, one slurred breath at a time. Always drinking. Always walking. Never falling. Never stopping.
Until he boarded a ship.
And one morning, as the sails caught wind over a grey-green ocean, he woke with the same thirst—but no desire to answer it.
Because there was no point anymore.
There wasn’t enough liquor in the world to unspill what he’d poured out of her life. Or the life inside her.
That was the day the drunkard ended.
And the student began.

Continued In which the drunkard learns the ship's language, forgets his own, and becomes the kind of man even the North Atlantic cannot kill.

It begins slowly. As all real things do.
After the drink ends, there is nothing left but space—the hollow left behind. And most men fall into that space. But he did not. He watched it. He listened to it. That was the first lesson.
The ocean doesn’t fill you. It empties you.
It does not give answers. It takes the questions and grinds them into silt.
He began as a deckhand. No one cared for his past. No one asked. At sea, your worth is in your silence and your spine. Can you haul line without complaint? Can you scrub deck without pride? Can you climb rigging in the rain without asking for applause?
He could. And he did.
He learned the language of canvas and rope, the moods of the wood beneath his feet. He learned what to listen for—the creak that meant the mast was tired, the groan that meant the cargo was shifting, the flutter that said a storm was hiding just beyond the stars.
He stopped speaking. Not out of shame.
Out of respect.
Because the sea speaks in silence.
Because some truths have no names.
And slowly, something changed.
He stopped being a man aboard the ship.
He became part of her.
They began to trust him with the helm during night watches. Then during storms. Then always.
He never asked for the wheel. It was simply given. Like a secret passed from the sea itself.
No ceremony. No title. No name.
The others came and went. Captains died, crews changed, flags shifted. But the helmsman remained.
He aged, but it didn’t show. Not in the way others did. His hands stayed steady. His posture unshaken. His eyes… clear. Not bright. Not dulled. Just clear—like the sky after a storm when the wreckage still floats.
Even the captain, the final authority under God, looked at him with reverence.
Not fear. Not deference.
Reverence.
Because the captain understood something most men didn’t:
The ocean bends only for two kinds of people—those it loves, and those it cannot drown.
The helmsman was both.
No one knew his name. They didn’t need to.
He was the ship.
The wheel.
The wind in her rigging.
The quiet voice that met the horizon each dawn and asked for nothing in return.
He had no rank. No home. No prayer but the one the stars made in their turning.
But when the wind shifted,
when the storm rose,
when the compass spun mad—
It was his hands they trusted.
Because he had already drowned once.
And come back wiser.

In which wrath lives in the waves, grace hides in the rigging, and a man is kept alive only because one of them believes he might yet be worth remembering.

Above the North Atlantic, the two Djinn watched.
They did not perch on clouds or whisper in waves like old tales suggest.
They were the things old tales came from.
The male Djinn hung in the darkness, just above the line where sky met water—vast, ancient, and seething. His form shimmered like heat, like smoke trapped in frozen air. He had been trying to kill the helmsman for years.
He had sent storms. Ice. Silence. Madness.
He had sent thirst and mutiny and rope burn.
He had dragged the ship toward rocks when the stars went hiding.
He had waited—every day—for Amir to break.
But the man would not.
Not because he was strong.
Because she wouldn’t let him fall.
The female Djinn moved through the rigging of The Inconstant like breath. She curled through the sails, settled gently on the helm when no one was looking. She did not shield Amir. She did not offer comfort.
She offered tests. Lessons. Endurance.
Where he sent wrath, she sent silence.
Where he struck, she withheld.
She wasn’t kind. But she was patient.
And she had seen him—not as the man who had taken a girl and left her to drown.
But as the man who had drowned beside her.
And chose, somehow, to keep walking anyway.
The male Djinn watched the helmsman now, hands steady on the wheel, eyes unreadable.
He hissed.
“He should have died.”
The female Djinn said nothing.
She was already moving, already brushing past Amir’s shoulder like wind through threadbare cloth. She pressed the faintest warmth against the cold knot of his spine.
A reminder.
That he was still being watched.
Still being judged.
But not yet condemned.

In which a boy names a monster, a captain forgets to be stern, and the crew quietly exhales because some ships are ruled not by fear—but by grace.

The wind shifted again. The sails flexed. The wheel creaked softly beneath the helmsman’s hands. Somewhere above, a gull screamed like a warning that came too late.
And then—
From the forecastle came a voice, high and bright.
“Captain! Permission to report a second sea monster, sir!”
There was a pause.
The captain, who had been watching the horizon, turned slowly.
Ratline stood at full attention—barefoot, shirt half-buttoned, hair like a haystack. He was holding a lump of tar shaped vaguely like a fish. One eye had been scratched into it with a nail. The other was just a thumbprint.
The captain stared.
The crew tensed, unsure.
And then—
He smiled.
Not a smirk. Not the tight curl of naval command.
A real smile.
He stepped down from the quarterdeck, crossed the planks, and crouched in front of the boy.
“Tell me,” he said quietly. “Did the first one have a name?”
Ratline blinked, then grinned. “I called it Captain’s Mother, sir.”
A beat of silence.
And then, gods help them, the captain laughed.
A sound like old sails catching wind for the first time in years.
The crew exchanged glances—but no one said a word.
Because a ship’s captain can be many things.
A tyrant. A judge. A ghost with brass buttons and no mercy.
But this one?
This one had just let a child name a sea monster after his mother.
And in the middle of the North Atlantic, under grey skies and older silences—
That meant they were safe.

I am trying to translate Universal Truth... please help me as I Die to understand I am not crazy... please.. anyone?

You're not crazy. Many have tried, and you're welcome to too.

What in particular could someone say to you, other than to say "keep going, I'm listening"?

I have not had a large life; As I approach the end, I am tempted to try and make something of it - a rounded tale that will have a legacy of meaning. I have done some things and had some relationships, nothing important or exciting, but who knows I might with a kind word or a cruel word have saved or ruined a life that would or will transform things for everyone.

But it doesn't matter. The drama is ephemeral and I am nothing more than the drama as it plays out to the curtain. The applause or the boos I will not hear. I have been on holiday my whole life, and this is just a postcard sent to a random stranger. I had a ball - I hope you did too.

I am reminded not of Moby Dick so much as Eric Newby's [The Last Grain Race

I am trying to translate Universal Truth... please help me as I Die to understand I am not crazy... please.. anyone? — Ian James Hillyard

I'm not entirely sure what you're asking or hoping for, but if life is beginning to slow down and cease, it might be helpful to focus on finding comfort and moments of peace in simpler, less stressful paths. Whatever brings you calm or peace now may be worth leaning into.