“You can’
t do this forever”
I shrug as I say it to passenger after passenger, usually in response to their queries about what I do on land, or what I’ll do when I decide to settle down. The truth is though; I try not to think about it. It is true – this career comes with an expiration date, eventually the sheer grind, pressure and more-over the loneliness, the inability to connect to anyone for long because you’re constantly moving, does get to you.
Eventually, circumstances force you to grow up. To put your feet on dry land and look reality in the eye.
That’s still a ways off for me, and so it’s always a wrench when someone close to me – particularly when it’s a Family member, of which I have so few – decides they’re done, and chooses to make the move to shore-side. Because as much as you’re thrilled for them (and I am! And the happiness is so genuine that it’s hard to express), you worry that you’ll never see them again, that they’ll walk out of your life the way so many others have in the past. Suddenly the time you have left in a contract with someone takes on a whole new meaning, a whole new importance, and every moment you have with that person gets as stretched as it can, even if you’re saying nothing at all. Even if you feel stupid, because you know you have other things to do that are more important than sitting around looking at photographs and sipping coca-cola and looking each other up on google just for the hell of it. But at that split second, nothing seems more important.
People ask me all the time how I manage this job with its constant farewells, with the constant sense of saying “goodbye” in so many different ways and so many different languages…I think if it weren’t for the fact that I have total faith in my important friendships, even the ones that I have no idea when I’ll see in the flesh again, and the fact that in some ways I’m just as constantly saying “hello”…if it weren’t for that I think I’d grow up a lot faster…
But, like Peter Pan…I’m just not ready yet.