Every morning I wake up angry from inability to change my life. I am stuck on a sailboat in Bahamas with no way out, despite Meg saying the wind will change. Today was no different, I am lying in bed wondering what it is I can do to occupy myself, to give my life meaning. I scramble for ideas and see none. Meg will make pancake batter, I’ll bake them and I can play Pharaoh game on computer. I can also clean the filthy walls in the cabin we sleep in. Meg keeps mentioning cleaning the bottom but I have no desire to do it. To face vast surface of the boat’s hull that keeps growing stuff. We keep cleaning it over and over. It seems, this is what our life has become. Cleaning the boat’s bottom, with our heads under water, counts down our days, our months and even years.
Meg said something yesterday that made me think. She said we are so disappointed with every place we come to that we can’t wait to leave it. I never thought about it this way, always finding fault in myself or both of us, but the reality is human world the way it is, is terribly unattractive or rather destructive, to me. And I am going to stop being ashamed of it. We didn’t like Canada, we left. We’ve bounced around the US having no right to stay there as anything other than tourists, still we had no desire to live there. We left. Then, it was the exile in the tropics. I keep wondering is it us who imposes this exile on us or is it the circumstances, the world, the way it is? There is the war in Ukraine, Russia wages. There is the USA with it’s boring, futile yet never-ending show of who will be the president. There are all the elites around the world hungry to remain in power and get reacher who keep squeezing the little people. Is this the world Meg and I are supposed to want to belong to?
I imagine, there are nice people out there somewhere. There must be. But what does it matter? They are not in my and Meg’s life. They don’t know about us and we don’t know them. We have no-one. No-one at all. This is what people don’t seem to grasp. They have no idea how hard it is to keep going on when you don’t see value or meaning to your life, which for us, humans, come only from being with others.
I never thought loneliness like this existed. I hadn’t a clue. In Russia, I was surrounded by people though I trusted none of them. Still, I had a sense of belonging. I had a country, a family, my hometown. Though these were just concepts and maybe even delusions, I could see them, I was living them. And now, I am with Meg, the person I love, and I have nothing. Not even an illusion of a place among people. Is it my fault? Should I have seen beyond Canada then, taking off from Turkey? But I couldn’t have known what Canada was. I knew nothing. And paradoxically, I don’t think I would have changed anything. I think I would still have jumped onto this yacht with Meg and headed off to sea. Because for me, there was nothing of value on land. Nobody but Meg loved me and nobody but Meg needed me.
Now, 18 years later, nobody loves and needs both of us. This is what we are surviving every day.
And we desperately trying to navigate our way towards a place where we may find those who would love us for ourselves. Is it Montenegro? Is it the USA? Is there such place at all on Earth? I believe that only the very few of us find our tribe during our life time. Meg and I found each other. I am wondering if this is all we will have. At least this is how it looks now, while we are stuck in Bahamas with winds never ceasing to blow from North-East.
The future? The hope? I don’t know if Meg and I will ever have anything but sea, this boat and each other. Maybe wanting people and thinking we may actually be loved is what is killing us? Thinking that we have to find home, that it is out there somewhere? But how do you not want people and home if humans evolved to be social creatures. You can’t! Which means, Meg and I are facing another day of total isolation that we have to survive.
The kicker is, something I can’t believe is our reality, is that in order to reach the place where we might want to go on, where we might feel alive again, we need to cross an ocean and a sea. Because it is only there, back to where this wild saga began the horrible me, the Russian, is allowed to step on land and maybe even stay.