“Now Bangkok’s pouring rain and I’m going ‘round again and I ain’t seen my girl in 15,000 miles…and is it true it’s always happy hour here? And if it is I’d like to stay awhile, and as cliché as it may sound I’d like to raise another round, and if your bottle’s empty help yourself to mine, thank you for your time – and here’s to life” – Mekong (The Refreshments)
250 days out…
45 days left…
22 ports…
23 sea days…23 very long, very dragging sea days, including one trans-Atlantic crossing.
Not of course that I’m counting. Not that I have a ‘convicts calendar’ pasted to my cabin wall, with great red slashes through the dates that indicate the first half of the month. The rest of the markings are legible only to me, mostly various initials indicating where friends are (“H to WST”, “T to RT”, “S to IoM” “M to LV” etc ) my own way of keeping track of where my various Siblings are in the world. All are in places elsewhere than here. Normally this doesn’t bother me, I’m quite used to my family being far-flung, but sometimes…
But when you find yourself talking to your mother over the crackling connection of the satellite dependant phone, and you both realize at the same time that you’ve been out for nearly a year, that home and work have swapped places. You don’t live at home anymore; you just come back for a visit once in a while? Well, it can hit you hard.
I’m an ex-citizen of nowhere, and sometimes I get mighty homesick
Out here your world shrinks after a while, you talk about going home for the night in reference to going back to your cabin, watching a movie on your laptop and crawling into bed simply because you don’t feel like going to the Officer’s Bar that night. With the time differences being what they are right now, calls home are left until the wee small hours of the morning, or late, late at night, and email checks become uncertain as the people you’re hoping to hear from are seldom awake when you are.
By the time I’m finished with this contract, I will have seen well over 100 ports and traversed countless days at sea, I will have made friends that will last me a life time, made connections that run deeper than I ever expected, I will have been to Hong Kong Disneyland twice, Singapore twice, climbed the Great Wall of China, had my photograph taken in Antarctica, sailed around Cape Horn and danced under the stars in Tahiti.
I will have been away from Victoria for 295 days. At least.
In multiple ways that I cannot even explain, or if I could they are not for this venue, my life has changed forever on this voyage. I am a vastly different woman from the one who trekked up the gangway in Seattle in June. I always am, I’ve said many times before that every contract changes you, but this one has thrown my very sense of self into a spin that I’m only just starting to pull out of. It seems that one thing happens and just as my head and heart start to resolve it, another quake comes. Most of those changes are good, and have brought on the kind of self-examination that, even though it may feel like you’re being torn apart and rebuilt from the ground up, you come out of a stronger and better person. That said, there are only a few things that remain steady under my feet these days, and for those I remain eternally grateful.
But whoever I am, and whoever I become…what I am right now?
Well….
Out here they got a name for rain, for wind and fire only, but when you’re lost and all alone there ain’t no word but lonely….
A shepherd of the seas.