Apparently I so rudely left the blogosphere out of the loop.
Remember how I mentioned that I was going to Amsterdam in May?
Well, I’m here! I’ll be here til Tuesday. Talk to you all then!
Dewey!
And what if I want to be out adventuring at one in the morning? It doesn’t even have to be with anyone. I wish I wasn’t constrained by sleepiness or a disgusting head and chest cold. I’m just in love with the idea of being out, walking on the hushed streets on a cool May evening like this. Light runs along the sidewalks and plazas like rivers and small creeks. It rushes over edges and trickles across intersections and flows quietly along the edges of the road while we all sleep. I want to follow it and pursue it even into the deepest corners of the morning. I suppose eventually I would either be swallowed into darkness that not even the water-like light will touch, or the streams of leaking man-made light would be drown by the light gushing from the sky from a pale yellow heavenly chandelier rising in the east.
The world is indeed flat. I can tell you this because I’m sitting on the edge of it. My boat is riding just off from the edge as we run parallel to the cliff of the earth. It’s the place where sea and sky become one and eventually the darkness swallows anything nearby in its insatiable and endless hunger.
I feel somewhat like an astronaut. The only difference is, is in space there would be no sound and there’d be no water at the edge of their ship.
I stared at one star near what I thought I could make out as the horizon. I stared at it long enough that I almost could see the earth tilting. When you’re sitting in the middle of a forest or in a backyard during the day and you can feel the earth moving, it’s incredible and fascinating. At night on the sea… It’s absolutely terrifying.
While leaning on the glass railing of the balcony, all I could think was “That’s the rest of the universe and I’m looking straight into it.” How do we not go around with the fear that one of these days gravity will lose its grip and we’ll all just fall into that huge expanse?
On nights like these I find the sky to be less like a ceiling and more like a nothingness–a huge expanse that we’re inside.
It’s this huge, dark, silent and roaring space and we’re just a little strip of land floating inside of it.
It made me want to grip the arm of my chair harder.
It’s absolutely awe-striking and completely terrifying.
I feel like we have gone inside a huge planetarium.
It’s as dark as it’s going to get tonight. When looking off the side of the boat, you can see the white water rushing from underneath, and you can see the dark blue water for about forty feet before everything is swallowed in an immense black.
At one point there were two ships out on the horizon in front of us, so if I blocked the white waves out below me from my line of sight, it looked like we were sailing straight into deep space.
After the other ships in the distance were long past, I felt like the stars were holes in which someone on the outside shook flashlights over. The sky felt like a jet black ceiling.
I feel like we’ve passed into a walking closet of the world that has been forgotten about and left empty. It’s like a pitch dark breezeway between rooms in a house.
There is hardly any sense of spatial relation to anything. The stars are the closest light that is not from the glowing city on water.
And back home I had never seen a star twinkle or flicker. Out here, all of them do. Every single star’s light wavers and is not constant. The stars never go out, but it’s still very different from anything I’ve seen in my backyard.
Another reason it feels like I’m in somekind of a dark hallway or a planetarium of gigantic proportions is because of how the stars have a fixed position in the sky. If we were truly travelling my brain would expect me to see the stars slide slowly but surely towards the back end of the ship. During the daylight I can see the ship passing the rivets in the water and moving past the waves. The waves sloshing against the metal exterior of the ship gives my mind some kind of a landmark for my mind to work against so I know that we’re still moving. But at night there is only darkness and the stars remain where their geostationary and heavenly bodies were when I looked up ten minutes ago.
It’s dark. I can not longer see the water except the water that glows unnaturally blue just at the edge of the boat. My sense of space outside of my own body is completely limited to the architectural features of my 4 x 9 balcony, my chair, my laptop in front of me, and the glass sitting on the small table beside me.
I was unable to write or even power up my laptop when I first stepped out onto the balcony because of this alarming phoenomenon. Because there is no sense of space or distance, the brain starts to panic. There is no frame of reference to anything outside of the ship. Even though this sensation is extremely strange and foreign, I kind of like the feeling.
I feel completely isolated for the first time since I left my house.
I feel like we are completely alone in the universe and if we were sink or be lost, we would never be found.
I feel like I am a child hiding in a closet. We’ve left the door far behind and the ship will cut through the black nothing until dawn when we’ll reach the next room in the house.
I feel like this is my first vacation. For some reason it’s like I didn’t really pay attention before. I remembered the scent of the Florida air, but that’s only because I subconciously assign smells to memories and it has been printed into my mind because of my various trips to Disney World as a child. Besides the scent, I have almost no memories of any sensory input except the freezing water when swimming in Cozumel, Mexico on the day after Christmas.
I’m realizing that despite what many people think, going on a cruise is no way to “get away”. When you board one of these gargantuan ships, you’re not getting away from anything. There is everything from pools, saunas, spas, stores, lounges, restaurants, hotel rooms, and anything else you can imagine that would be put on a floating city.
It’s even more sophisticated than an average vacation to a Florida beach house. The beach house bedrooms might be more spacious, but other than that the crew of the ship makes everything so incredibly convenient it’s sickening.
“Hi. We’re definitely moving, so I wanted to call and say goodbye really quick.”
“Oh, okay. Come back home soon.”
I paused to reply. Solid land was inching away from the edge of the boat.
“I will.”
This really was the only moment I felt anything remotely close to leaving.
After the ship-wide emergency drill, I went back to my room and powered up my laptop, noting that my 4′ by 9′ balcony is the perfect place to do some editing. My computer booted up, and in the process alerted me that there were wireless connections available.
Please don’t tell me that they have Wi-Fi, I thought. Please don’t tell me they have Wi-Fi.
Sure enough. There were the words “Carnvial Wi-Fi” and directly following them there was a large green bar indicating the excellent strength of the signal.
The only difference between a cruise ship and home, is there is no driving, no corporate sector, and you have to pay for everything. Seven dollars a minute to call the United States, ten dollars anywhere else. Their satelite wi-fi has prepaid plans. Anything but the barebone drinks like water, tea, and lemonade cost extra. Island excursions are hundreds of dollars. The cans of pop that the statesmen so kindly put in your room cost three or four bucks a piece.
There’s no escape from anything. Cruises are nice vacation, but they are hedonism as its finest.
I’m home from the cruise!
My flight home leaves tomorrow at eight in the morning, so I won’t have internet again really until tomorrow night.
Lots of posts and stories to follow. (Hopefully pictures, keep your fingers crossed!)
I didn’t know there were such things as getting splinters from cactuses. But, ow, I know now.
My sister and I have decided that we need to mount a video camera onto my dashboard. We’d be YouTube starlets because of the conversations we have.
“And you’d be like ‘WHOA!’ And I’d be like ‘Yeah!’ You’d say ‘Haley I’m so impressed with your musical tastes,’ and I’d be like ‘Why thank you, I heard this and thought of you,’ and then we’d be best friends forever!”
“Wait, we’re not best friends forever already?”
“Well… We are… It’d just solidify it.”
“Oh, right. We were best friends forever but now we’re bestest friends forever and ever. I mean, until–”
“Until I’m eighty and deaf and instant message you in all caps.”
In other news, I’m about to take a hiatus. (Heh, not that I haven’t sort of taken one already this week, as one reader pointed out.) I have a good reason for this one. I’m headed south to Florida and then onto a giant boat that’ll whisk me away for a week.
For all of you who are still suffering in freak snowstorms and less than fifty-degree weather, I promise I’ll bring some sunshine back for you.
“Yes you are.”
“I am not!”
“You is be.”
“I ain’t is be nothin’!”
(The best part about this is it was between two very intelligent individuals. Bad grammar just for kicks, anyone?)
I didn’t used to cry during movies. It took a lot for me to even near that point, and only one or two movies had claimed the title of pushing me over that point.
But all that’s changed now.
I’ve allowed the characters to start reaching through the screen and touching the deepest chords of my heart. Or maybe the roots and flowers in my heart have broken through the concrete shell. Or I’ve finally found the way to let the well overflow.
Either way it’s movies like In America and Bella that contain moments of such beauty, and self-less love, and community that I just want to sink into my chair and drown in a puddle of my own tears.
I want those things so much for this world. I want that for the people of Amsterdam; the ones that seek for love and hope in everything but find it in nothing. I want it for my own town; a place that seems to be either asleep or dying, and whose people desperately need true community and authenticity. I want it for my family. I want it for the strangers I pass everyday.
I know we all want it to an extent and maybe I’m just one more person saying all this, but there’s so much opportunity around us that I barely know where to start.
I just know that when I look back on my life I want to be able to see that I at the very least tried. Tried to bring beauty, love, hope, and community to wherever I am in life.
Oh. Maybe I do know where to start.
Tomorrow is a place to start.
I was in the middle of a movie when someone called and asked if I could send an email for them while they were out of town. I said yes, then had to go digging through my email to find the correct email address. Amidst all the digging, I came across an email from 2005.
“If worse comes to worst, I can stay at the motel down the street. I love you enough to sleep with cockroaches. I’d prefer not to, but I would.”
My response?
“‘I love you enough to sleep with cockroaches.’? Alan, think twice before you say something like that again.”
