So my presence has been absent for awhile, I know. But I have a good reason! I graduated college (gasp!) and I accepted a position back on the A.J. Meerwald, from June to November. I’m only writing here now because I’ve got a few days off and ditched the small city of Bivalve, NJ. By small, I mean 6 people. The closest civilization is a Wawa about 7 miles away.

Pull out all the stops, we are coming home tonight.
A pair of old boxing gloves in a new fight.

So now I’m back at home, and trying to avoid the feeling of being trapped after so much happiness and freedom that the boat has already given me in my three weeks time there.

Every single scar, well it means something to me, as if life wrote down my history.

Where do I begin about the boat? This season, it’s drastically different. Okay, so that’s an exaggeration, but the crew is what makes the experience and they are very different. Less hippy, as Josh (current crew member) would say. The crew is primarily male, with the heavily tatted and often crude Josh; the brilliant but just as crude Jersey; “Super Seaman” Steve; Bakari, a friend of AJ’s and a crew member from last season after I left; and the token gay man, Mikey. Other than the guys, there’s Steph and Emily, Kat (from last season) and the cook, Danielle. Already some crew members have paired off, though I won’t name any names because they’re trying to be discreet.

Rollin with (part of) my crew

Bottles and road signs sound like tires on bent wheels,

Our hands and feet in ordinary thrills.

It’s unusual to be single. But intensely enjoyable. It gives me the time to not worry about taking care of another person and use all of my energy to take care of myself, something I stopped doing for quite awhile. It gives me the time to think about the rest of my life, who I want to be, where I want to be, what’s most important to me. I don’t have many answers yet, but sometimes it’s not about the answers, it’s about the questions.

When we unlocked all the doors, just so we could finally breathe.
Just so we could sew down these torn up sleeves.

Anyway, enough soul-searching, self-serving mumbo-jumbo….now back to life at sea. My bunk this year is in the uncomfortable place right next to the galley table; very little storage space, next to no privacy. I miss fore peak (foc’sle) living from last year, but I think part of it is that I really haven’t had the time to move into my bunk properly. I’ve been on the boat since June 3rd and I haven’t spent one night sleeping in my bunk. I spend most of my nights in the vastly more comfortable and better ventilated crew house, where the crew likes to get riotously drunk or at least have a beer before bed while watching an inane comedy or ridiculous horror movie.

This roof could be my bed
Blankets feel like the night sky, blankets feel better the heavier they get.

The food is fucking ridiculously good; we truly eat like kings with gourmet and international surprises at every meal. Though I do miss meat in my diet as the boat eats vegetarian. The work is exhausting, but I like it that way. At the end of the day, I feel like I’ve done something tangible, something concrete. Whether that’s sanding, priming, and painting a cabin top or teaching tempestuous middle schoolers about science, it’s something.

Here we stand with a wolf-like shadow, here we stand in the end.

So, back at home life. Last night while out to dinner with my father and brother (my mother has abandoned the family for a sisters weekend in Cape Cod), my father embarrassed me horribly, more than he realized. The waiter continually referred to us all as “gentlemen” and by the third time he did it, my dad interrupted him and said, “This is my daughter, so you know.” The waiter looked horribly humiliated and back tracked quickly. My brother later chastised my dad for saying anything and my dad just shrugged. I stared at my plate for the rest of the meal and the situation put me off my food intensely. So, feeling this overwhelming discomfort, I went to talk to him about it. And though I’d had the “gender talk” with my mom already and assumed she’d told my dad, that assumption was apparently wrong. I started from the embarrassing beginning and tried to explain myself with him foundering on the true motivations behind it all. Frankly, he doesn’t get it. He’s trying, but he really doesn’t. He asked why I have to flaunt my gender difference; he asked why I can’t just celebrate being a woman. I wanted to scream, “you’re missing the point!” Honestly, I’m tired of these conversations. I just want to be left alone to a world where people already get it, or if they don’t get it, they quietly embrace it because it’s what makes me happy, it’s my life, etc etc. Like my crew members for example; I’ve told them all at this point. Most of them don’t really understand, not in the same way that queer people do, but they accept it. I’m equally included as one of the guys, for the most part; yet can casually sink into the realm of girl’s world if I choose. That, in essence, is the only thing I really want. The fluidity to move across the lines because in my daily life, I straddle them. My dad insists that one day soon I’ll have to compromise my gender expression for the world; I don’t believe that’s true.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

—Martin Luther King Jr.

 

I stood back on the couch, remembered this is my life,
with my hands over my head, friends by my side.

Here is where we’ll go; I will take us home.

 

So now, it’s off to the open ocean, off to NY City.

SAIL

 

Hey New York, here’s our wolf-like shadow.

Hey New York, our old friend.

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