Time Painted Pictures – Sydney, Nova Scotia – [09/30/2014]

The pictures we carry, the frames we gladly add to the weight of our luggage, , are of the people we trust to love us no matter what. ~ Some Girls

There are two things that go into my carry on first on my way to every contract, before anything else, before the computer, before the uniforms, before everything. One is the clear folder that holds all the legal information to get me to, from and onto the ship…the other is a battered, torn up, nearly worn up office mail envelope that contains the photographs.

I remember the first photograph I pasted on my cabin wall. It was of Sarwean and I, grinning at the camera during a crew party in the mooring deck during my very first contract, the last picture we had taken together that was any good. We both looked care-free, just on the edge of a laugh. For three years that picture stayed on my “Pack wall”, until life dictated that it didn’t belong there anymore.

Sarwean’s picture is long gone, and others have come and gone in its place. Gabrielle’s image rested on the wall for a season, and may well get pasted there again; the team from my treasured Mediterranean Dreams contract is up there, as is the ‘Cats band from that same summer. Silver’s up there of course, twice. The only reason there’s no picture of my parents? Is because until recently one didn’t exist – growing up we just didn’t take a lot of pictures, and film was expensive to develop. I fully intend to have one of the pictures from California printed up this season, they belong up there more than anyone else after all.

The second image I ever added to my travel pack was of the ‘Cats band from my fourth contract – the season I met Amras. It was part of a series that were taken the same night. In it, “my boys” and I are caught mid-laugh, though the photo was posed, it was about the fifth we had taken that night, none of them had turned out quite right. But somehow in that one I have the most dazzling smile on my face. It was our last night together as a group, Amras was debarking the next morning, and I was honestly sure I was never going to see him – or any of the others – again…I think I had been crying moments before that shot was taken.

Lookie how wrong I was about that (thank heavens), because fate has thrown my Big Brother and I together nearly every summer since.

That picture is still the first one out of the envelope and the first one on the wall.

My second contract the paintings joined the pictures, printed off of office computers, selected with a combination of care and carelessness, the print outs have a story behind them too. Stories of dragons fought and conquered, of battles lost and won, scars healed and scars opened. When I first started travelling with them they weren’t laminated, and so they are tattered and torn around the edges, and the ink has been run in places where it got knocked with wet hair in a hurry to get ready for formal night.

They don’t just tell a story, those images on my wall, they are a story. You can track my life across them, if you know how to read…