The people on that cursed ship on that cursed night saw me shoot myself in the head.

The guilt had been overpowering. One slip of the trigger and a man lay dead before me, the blood seeping through his thick lifejacket.

What will haunt me til the day I do die is the knowledge that he would be stripped not only of that lifejacket, but most likely his clothes by the end of the night, to give someone else a chance to survive.

But no-one would, even those rich women already out to sea in those barely filled boats. From that day on they would never forget. And that memory would slowly suffocate them from the inside out, until they, like the man I had shot, slipped into the grateful oblivion of death.

Back to me. My supposed 'death'.

How ironic that an accidental shot would have hit its mark so purely – and one of deadly intent would miss my brain altogether and leave me in pain but no doubt alive.

So I was one of the many that escaped that ship, and waited all those agonizing hours for the boats to come back.

The pain kept me awake. It would not let me succumb to the sea. I had supported myself against a block of wood, perhaps a door in its glory days, now another factor that saved me.

Why did I want to be saved? Pain, guilt, a hollow sadness spreading like a disease through my body – what reasons were these to live?

But my madness had ebbed and the gutsy lad from my childhood warmed my core, demanding that I never let Death win.

And the music.

Someone was singing. A shaky voice perhaps, but a song. Like those musicians who had regaled us our ship had sunk to the bottom of the sea, taking them with it.

Knowing that someone else was alive, someone else needed so much to stay alive.

When it stopped, its last notes echoing for what seemed like hours (what didn't seem like hours this endless night?), sorrow overtook me and I sobbed.

My tears were swept away immediately, the grieving ocean reprimanding me, reminding me I no longer had the right to cry.

But I didn't stop.

And that was how they found me.

No-one spoke as they hauled me onboard, wrapping me in blankets and clearing me a space.

As we waited so many more centuries for our ultimate rescue, I wondered why someone up there had decided to give me another chance.

Not even a second chance. Third, fourth, tenth…? All my lives piled up before me like dominoes toppling in the pattern of something so complicated I would never be able to describe it.

In and out of jail, passing moments when my parents could bring themselves to look at me, a stint as and many a night with a prostitute – and all the while, never letting my little brother out of my sight for more than ten minutes.

My little brother became one of the elite new money, and conveniently forgot his family name and any memory thereof.

I do not know whether he had sailed with the rest of us, to his untimely doom on the ship of dreams.

That so quickly became the ship that would send us all to a place that we could only dream of.

Our maker.