where's the line between the sea and the sky?
i could never live in a landlocked state
You know how in those regency era novels, the doctors always prescribed a trip to the seaside for their condition-struck patients? I wish that were commonplace. I would love to submit a leave of absence saying “brb have to go catch some medicinal sea breeze. c u when mental breakdown passes”.
I didn’t send a formal notice to any of my professors, but I did take that trip to the sea once the semester ended in May. It was an impromptu decision, tagging along with my aunt’s family on their yearly cruise-going, but I thought it would be a good way to celebrate finishing my lower-division courses. A symbolic end to my time at the local junior college, and the start of another phase of my life—one that consisted of an ivy-covered private university, fortunately closer to the bay than my previous college.
Of course this meant missing the first in-person graduation in years at said junior college because it took place the day before we would have to get up at 3am to drive six hours to embark the ship. But one event seemed to outweigh the other. I still received my cap, gown, and various other paraphernalia from being in the school’s honors society chapter. Just for the memories.
Although my experiences on the cruise had mostly consisted of food poisoning and frankly, and quite literally, cabin fever, I had still enjoyed myself for I had the window to sit in and look out of. I was on the good side of the ship. I would see dolphins arching over the rushing blue water. My aunt’s family, meanwhile, saw nothing on their side of the ship, so I’ll consider the food poisoning thing a lucky incident. My aunt had told me that once I’m off the ship, I would miss it—which part she meant, I’m not sure. The one thing I do miss is the ocean. I live in California and can always reach the ocean, but that’s not what I mean. I mean being in the middle of the thing, experiencing it, being at its mercy. Not seeing another living thing, or strip of land, for days. The waves gently rocking the ship, which at night serves to be a better sleep aid than any melatonin supplement. And the little epiphanies you have when you look at the vast blue for hours on end. Like realizing the longer you look at the horizon, the less it seems to exist. (Where does the sky begin? Where does the Earth end?) Like realizing the little arches of white foam atop every wave looks like a bunch of bunnies hopping to get to the same place I’m going.
An excerpt from an email to a friend yet to be sent:
Saturday, 11pm. 21 May 2022.
I’m writing this to you in Room 2235 from the windowsill of my cabin. It is night time, and much has happened, yet I’m still able to end the day with such simplicity. I sit at the large window, and there is room enough on the white, curved sill to stretch out your legs. When I look out, I see the rippling and foamy waves that the ship’s engine is causing. I feel the dips and rises the ship makes concurrently with those waves. It’s really nice. It’s beautiful. And it’s rocking me to sleep. But I’ll push through enough so that I can recount my day to an imaginary you. Lest I forget. At least I have the moonlit waves to power me through […] Heading to my sofa bed now. Unfortunately, it’s on the far side of my beloved window, so I have to part with it.
Goodnight.
I just finished rereading The Little Prince. It's been so long; the last time I had read it was when I was a child, and now I'm an adult who was once a child.
There was a particular page that stuck with me. The narrator that crashed his plane into the Sahara desert had told the little prince he found the desert beautiful for some reason:
I've always loved the desert. You sit down on a sand dune. You see nothing. You hear nothing. And yet something shines, something sings in that silence...
And the little prince had said that the desert was beautiful because it hides a well somewhere, just like how the stars are beautiful because of a flower you don't see (remember his one and only, precious rose, if not a tad bit vain, on his little planet?) With that, the narrator was finally able to understand the mysterious radiance of the sand dunes. When the narrator was a little boy, he lived in an old house that supposedly had hidden treasure buried somewhere in it. He was never able to find the treasure, but it cast a spell over the entire house, making it forever lovely in his mind.
Is this what happened to my yellow boat and the ocean? Growing up on the bay, my parents had kept up this nonsensical and trivial lie that we owned a yellow boat. We lived in a set of apartment complexes in Marina Bay, right in front of the Pacific, and there was this little sliver of the immediate ocean designated for residential sailboat parking. It was right in front of our house, so whenever my parents and I went for a walk, I'd always ask "Is this where our yellow boat is parked?", pointing to a different direction each time. And they would always say yes. (I'm not entirely sure who started it first: whether my parents told the lie first, out of nowhere; or perhaps I was the first to ask whether we had a boat, and they came up with the lie then.) Whenever I'd see the slightest hint of yellow on a sailboat, I'd always ask, "Is this our boat?" and they'd always say yes, regardless of whether we were still in Marina Bay or not. I think I even asked the question when we were in Lake Tahoe, once. Although, I don't think I ever truly believed them. It's the same way that a child knows an adult is lying, but still exercises some belief in it. So it's not that I didn’t believe we had a yellow boat—no, I never doubted that. It's just that the boats were never yellow enough for me to believe that that was our boat. Rightfully so, as most sailboats are white. That's probably why my parents had chosen yellow for our imaginary boat. But I never really gave up the hope that I'd find a truly yellow boat—up until you become older without warning, and beliefs like that fade away without notice. Funnily enough, my parents have never admitted that it was a lie. And when I bring up the topic of the yellow sailboat, they still keep it up. (I had asked the same question when we disembarked at one of our cruise destinations and saw all kinds of sailboats there.) I guess it keeps us young.
And so, just like narrator's house and its hidden treasure in The Little Prince, the yellow boat had cast a spell over all the oceans for me. Whether it's a house or the stars or the desert or the ocean, "what makes them beautiful is invisible!"
I’m back home now. Back to seeing the ocean from the shore. It holds its own charm, though.
The waxing and waning of the ocean shore holds a lot of funny memories for me. That is, if someone were to ask me one of those stupidly broad questions like “What’s your favorite memory?” I’d actually be able to answer. There was this one time my relatives and I were coming home from a Bay Area day trip and we decided to stop by one of the beaches near the Golden Gate. It was nearing sunset so the memory is still deliciously hazy with streaks of light here and there just like the ones you see in expired film exposures. We went down to play chicken with the shores. However, my aunt was standing too close to the advancing sea and because she was too distracted taking photos with one of her Polaroid land cameras, or perhaps her ContaxT3, her shoes got wet and dirtied by the wet sand. So she sought out to clean her shoes of the sand and waited for another wave to come back to land.
“There! Another wave!” My mom shouted out further down the beach.
And my aunt had bent down, holding her shoes in her hands, to catch the wave. I, on the other hand, started running up and away from the water. What my aunt and mom didn’t realize was that wave was going to reach up farther than they thought it would. And it did. The waves absolutely soaked my aunt, her panicked shrieks filling the humid and cold air. Everyone else, including me, bellowed with laughter. I to the point that my knees gave out from how humorous the situation was. The humor was compounded by the realization that the locals further up the beach (probably all drying off, and staying away from the waters because of how rough and cold it gets during sunset) were probably judging us and shaking their heads at how foolish us “tourists” were (despite my living there throughout childhood).
Her clothes up to her midback were soaked, and though she tried her best to dry it off, once we went back to the car she kept sneezing. Later I found out she caught a cold soon after, and my laughter started back up again.
Last year, I had taken a day trip to Pacifica with my two cousins. The eldest, who is seven years older than I and a photographer, had a shoot booked so we decided to go along for the ride. When presented with it, I could never miss a day at the beach, even if it’s as grey and cold as it was when we went that day.
My younger cousin and I also ended up playing chicken with the shore, and a surprising amount of time went by like that. When it approached evening, it’s like a new city was propping up before my eyes. All the sailboats on the sea who would’ve went by unnoticed, suddenly lit up. And suddenly, there were floating buildings. Each with their own set of workers, going about their day. We had little Venice miles away from where it originally stands. I had wondered what it was like for them; what it was like to live in a world so seemingly separate from ours. At least now, I can empathize with them, even just a little.
p.s. I promise not every one of these entries will be about the ocean.
