In Transition – At Sea – [12/28/2011]

It’s a velvet prison sometimes, this strange world in which I live. In which so many people that are close to me these days live.

We pretend we aren’t tied to anything, and in some ways we’re not. That’s what makes us lonely sometimes: the constant motion. Always moving, separated from family, from loved ones, from friends.  But in reality, we’re shackled to this ship as surely as if we were bound in a jail-cell. More than that, we’re tied to the sea. She owns us, calls to us, and covets our soul like children lusting after chocolate in a candy store window. We can no more leave than we could sprout wings overnight.

Selkies, the lot of us. Ever searching for our skins that we may return from whence we came.

We settle down eventually, ship-life is an escape from reality that you can only keep up for so long. The real world catches up with us sooner or later. But I can’t help but wonder, if part of us doesn’t always twitch a bit once we make landfall. I wouldn’t know, as it hasn’t happened to me yet.

After all, once a selkie finds her skin, neither bonds of love nor bonds of steel can keep her from the sea.

The other night I was talking to my best friend back home, leaning with my back propped against the side of my bunk bed, phone cradled against my shoulder – and invisible electric line stretching all the way back to Victoria. She asked me if I remembered someone who had just started hanging out with us before I shipped out.

Bella, I haven’t seen anyone in almost a year…do you think I remember faces anymore?

Yeah. I try not to think about it lest it drive me mad. I don’t know how the bar-staff do it, pulling this long a contract all the time, never seeing anyone, only going home for a few months out of the year. I don’t know how they handle it.

And yet, I wouldn’t change it. If offered the choice to be ‘normal’, to live a stable (not that my life is really unstable, it’s just different) land-locked life, I wouldn’t do it. A lot of people worry about me drifting around out here; don’t. I have people to come home to, I have people waiting for me on other ships (heck, I have people in other countries), remember what I’ve said before about kite-strings…and this is the strange thing: I would have been just as lonely if I’d stayed where I was. In many ways I sense I would have been worse. The kind of loneliness you experience on ships is a physical thing, you can pin-point its cause and you can battle its effects. You know eventually that it will end, that you’ll see your people again soon enough, you just have to fill the time between now and then. The kind of soul-deep loneliness that attacks you at home is a different thing altogether, one that’s all tied up in not knowing what or who you’re lonely for, not knowing what you want or where you’re going. That kind of loneliness can eat you up from the inside out, until there’s nothing left of you but a sparkle behind your eyes of what you could have been.

Out here, that’s at least one thing I don’t have to worry about.

Philosophical musing aside; the ship is in transition now, and it’s an odd transition indeed. We have several guests onboard who are staying with us for the Grand World Voyage and of course a multitude who are not. This presents another version of the old ‘oil and water’ concept, you get a strange mix of evening gowns that touch the ground and shorts with T-shirts on formal nights, and no matter how hard you try, one side always complains about the other.

For my part, I sit at my desk in my purple ‘magic’ dress (those who have seen it know which one it is), and mind my own business as much as possible. Mostly focusing on trying to get my inventory finished before my increasingly improbable self-imposed deadline of Jan 6^th…

My roommate and I get along well. It’s strange to have another presence in the room after so long, but she’s considerate and quiet and we keep similar hours.

Life keeps rolling along ,as it so often does.

And I keep looking for my seal-skin…