solitude under the stars

Winter months at sea are my favourite.

Unlike the summer months, where the seas are crowded with boats and the screams of irritable children rival the screeches of gulls, winter has the one thing I cherish most: solitude.

When I stop the quiet rumble of my engine, the silence is so deafening to the point I can hear my own heart beat and my blood rush through my veins. When I turn off the lights, I can look at the night sky and see the moon and the stars illuminate my path. I can identify the constellations running across the onyx canvas, constellations my father pointed out to me as he recalled each ill-fated story. I can watch in quiet awe as the aurorae unfurl with a flourish, lighting up the black in hues of green, blue, and red.

My own little observatory.

***

When I was a child, my parents bought a boat on a whim. My father christened it the 1966, because that was the year my parents met. That very summer, they took my sisters and me boating through the Sunshine Coast. It was there I first met and fell in love with the quiet, crystal-blue ripples of the sea, the ripples our boat made as it gently carved through the water.

I always felt safe in her wooden embrace, listening to the gentle hum of the engine as the waves lulled me to sleep with its gentle rocking. I still do.

***

My father once said that I am a child of the sea. “He may be my blood,” I heard him say to his brother, “but his soul was forged from the depths of the Pacific. I was only there to guide him home.”

I agree. After all, my name means “of the sea”.

***

When I became of age, I bid my family farewell, planning to embark on a journey to the Arctic North. For the last six years of my life, I had yearned for the day I would be able to live on the sea, to be forever captivated by her unpredictability, her storm and her calm.

My desire was fulfilled a week later when I arrived at the shores of Western Canada and bought a boat with the money I had earned working as a waiter during my four years of high school.

I remember stepping on her deck for the first time, looking around and being wholly in awe of her. Despite the cracks in her paint and the rust that covered the door of the cabin, she was mine. And when we sailed out, the calls of birds and men fading behind us and Vancouver becoming nothing more than a thin line as the waves pushed us farther and farther into the bluest of seas, I felt the tightness in my chest melt away and be replaced with a quiet satisfaction.

I was home.

***

I look across the glass and see nothing but darkness for miles. The cool open air envelopes me in an embrace as I lift my face toward the fairy lights strung above my head. I reach for them, my fingers longing to close my fist around its cool shell, its warmth pulsating through me and bringing some colour back into my cheeks.

But they are not for me to take, only to be shoved in the back of a long-forgotten closet for years to come. Nor are they bound to the stories of bears and brotherhood, of heartbreak and heroes.

They are natural guides, gently pulling me to the home I perhaps was not forged in, but one I love and miss all the same.

Perhaps I’ll come home for Christmas this time.

And so I sail on.