Two Worlds, One Family – Victoria – [11/29/2013]

Put your faith in what you most believe in
Two worlds one family
Trust your heart, let fate decide
To guide these lives we see…

Sometimes it’s as though I’m two different people. And I don’t mean that in the sense of there’s ship-side me and shore-side me, it’s not a line that that differentiated. This…is something else.

There’s the daytime me, who’s genuinely happy to be home, who takes an immense amount of joy in being in her own place, in her own space, with her own solitude. Who bakes cookies and peach pie and laughs at Christmas movies with her family and takes an abnormal amount of pride in finally being tall enough to reach the hooks to hang up the Christmas pictures so that she can actually be of some help to her mother.

And then there’s the other me…who is so desperately lonely for the shipboard family she left behind, for the routine she got used to, that she knew never lasts forever…

That’s the thing with ships you see. Sometimes it’s easier to have a contract that’s hard, because then you’re just 100% happy to be out of there. You don’t really think about who you left behind because you didn’t really get close to anyone in the first place. But when one of those contract comes that gets behind your walls, where everything goes fantastically right, and you have to think really hard to remember anything bad about it, and even the bad parts tie into good parts and end up not counting…those are the ones that are hard to leave. Those are the ones that you come home, and you find yourself staying up late and wondering if they miss you at all, because you miss them.

You miss sitting in the front row of the mid-ship lounge every night, you miss the taste of white zinfandel after a long nightshift – and even though you have a bottle in the fridge at home, you somehow don’t have the heart to crack it, and you can’t really explain to anyone why. You miss laughter over the dinner table as you swapped stories with your roommate, you miss waking up in the morning and realizing that you were in the country you used to dream of, you miss giggling on the way to the officers bar at 6:45 every other night, and wondering how the mighty have fallen that you – who never drank at all – now can drink beer out of the bottle.

You miss your band, you miss your boys, miss them randomly inserting Christmas carols into solos, miss helping your brother lug his gear home at the end of the night, miss Lark’s smile from the bandstand as she silently asks you why you’re still there when you know damn well you should be asleep.

And it’s not that you’re not happy to be home. You’re always happy to be home. It’s just that you feel split between two homes at once, and that’s never easy to deal with. And thankfully you have insanely understanding parents…but that doesn’t always make a difference to the fact that you have moments of feeling foolish…

And lost in the twilight between your two worlds…