In the Wee Small Hours – Kusadasi 04/09/2011

Insomnia is a curse, but it is even more of a curse when you work and live shipside. If you’re awake in the dark hours of the morning on a ship, it suddenly feels as if the ship herself is actively conspiring to keep you awake: every creak, every clank, every rattle, all the sounds that usually soothe you into slumber, jar you from it.

That was me, last night.

At 4:30am, I finally gave it up as a bad job and dragged myself out of bed for good. This was after a few hours of reading, an hour’s waste of internet time, and countless hours staring at my ceiling to no avail. It was either be an early (extremely early) riser, or risk driving my roommate insane with my nocturnal wanderings of our tiny broom closet of a cabin.

So awake I was.

Before 6am I had already put in an hour’s worth of work on the inventory, and remembered that there is a lovely kind of peace that comes with an extremely early morning. No passenger in their right mind is really awake before 6am, save on adventurous soul who was sitting sending email in the corner of my library, I was alone with my books and my computer in the early morning twilight. I was even first in line for breakfast, which I was able to consume at a painfully slow rate considering all the time I had to kill before I could officially start duty.

So it was that I found myself up on Sky Deck ten watching the sun rise over Kusadasi. Being *ahem* far from a morning person, sun-rises are not things that I see very often, I never imagined I’d be seeing one over anywhere other than my own harbor. There is, however, a magic to sunrise, a magic that almost makes staying up half the night (or perhaps three quarters would be more honest) worthwhile. There is an incredible amount of peace that comes from watching the sky painted pale orange and deep blue, watching the deep purple of the last of the night being burned away by the ever present hope of a new day. Buildings that normally look dull and grey by day burn amazing colors in the early morning, and, as I was sitting there in the pale morning light, perched on the railings all by myself, nature’s alarm clock set itself off, and the birds all over the sleepy city began to wake up – calling to each other to stop being lazy, that morning was here.

Somewhere in the distance a single car horn shattered the morning silence like a distant train whistle, and the city glowed an unnamable shade of pale peach.

When I was a child, I used to draw the same picture over and over again, of a mermaid perched on a rock staring at a three-masted tall ship on the distant horizon. The sun in that picture was never full up, and someone asked me once if it was a sunrise or a sunset. At the time I was certain it was a sunset, now that I’m older and I realize more what that portrait was about, I’m not so sure. What was that mermaid seeing as she sat there in the dim light watching that ship? Acceptance, joy, hope, somewhere she belonged, people who could love her…

She was definitely seeing a sunrise….