Somewhere betwixt and between the busyness of rushing past the people close to me tantôt vers la droite, tantôt vers la gauche, somewhere I stop, and pause, and I wonder. I wonder.
Perhaps it is an email, or a Christmas card, or an unexpected visit during a fortuitous port call, where I come face-to-face with the vectored, linear time that slips by me so silently as I glide, day after day, through the deep blue. I fool myself that everyone else's lives sit static while I sail past; but I realize, panged, the concurrent motion is deceptive, and it's really I who flail endlessly in Never-Never-Land while everyone about me rushes past: grows up, moves on, marks the standard rituals of life. Marriages, births, deaths, graduations, anniversaries, an endless string of birthday candles flickering off into the horizon. Holidays. Celebrations. Families. Tradition. Generations. Time passing.
I mark time by the ship's bell. Eight bells and the watch relieves. Eight bells and day and date have slipped past; the seas are the same, the sky is the same, the cold-blown watches in red-lit, windowless rooms are the same; different and new and challenging but yet familiar, changing and unchanged, ever and the same.
There is that pang of regret that I have no hometown now, no one place to which I can return, no rootedness. It is both easier and harder that way, a life without an afterlife, present and past but no future. The sea is my home, salt spray and rushing wind and rocking wave. She is loath to release me and jealous for my return. Even in the welcome arms of a port call, the sea is calling, whispering for me to gaze out at that deceptive line between sea and sky, the ever-receding horizon beckoning me onward, tugging at my eyes, straining through binoculars.
I offer my relief. I stand relieved. Another watch, past.
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