On Sailing Ships

The halyards on the flag pole outside the Tavern sound like a ship’s mast when I close my eyes, smoking a cigarette.  I remember when I used to do that every winter as a little girl.  The sailing season would seem so far away in December, I’d have to close my eyes every time I saw a flag pole just to feel like I was in the yards again.  Sometimes I’d get fancy, and pretend the taxi cabs tires on the pavement, flying down Lexington Avenue, were waves against a hull.  People’s shouts became gulls cries, foots steps around me were luffing sails.  But there always had to be the halyards first, because nothing else in the world can match that sound.  My father told me once, it sounds like loneliness, but I think it sounds like home.

Or at least I did back then. 

Before I knew what a home was, only that I’d never had one, and I put all my faith in sailing ships to take me to where I belonged.  I didn’t see how they possibly couldn’t back then.  Sailing was everything.     I drew doodles of my father’s boat, The Sparrow, during all my classes at school.  I would practice splicing rope when I couldn’t sleep at night, which was often, and would braid my hair with green and red bands for port and starboard.  I wrote songs and poems about the sea in my veins and watched both Wind and Master and Commander religiously.  Looking back now, I realize that it wasn’t a mere obsession or compulsion, but a desperate necessity.   I had to make everything about sailing because I was wrong, it wasn’t everything, it was the only thing I had.  Instead of seeing the cramped dark apartment around me and a disheveled little kid with bruises on her skin, I saw myself with the wind in my hair hurtling farther and farther away from shore, my Dad’s brave little sailor girl.   The dreams pushed me onward, every day and every night, until the season would begin again.

It’s amazing how life changes.  I got a job in the yards when I was 17 and did really good working myself toward SUNY Maritime Academy until I got raped for the first time on Columbus day in 2008 by some asshole from my last high school.  It was the same story you always hear.  We had a bit to drink, I thought he was my friend.  And nothing could fix me afterwards, not even sailing, so I had to move to Connecticut and leave it all behind.  After everything I had been through, that really broke me.  The last time I sailed my Sparrow was about two weeks after that.  My Father made a careless call and we almost lost her in a nor’easter.  He gave me full ownership that night but she’s been sitting in a boatyard ever since.  

I swore I’d never do that when I was a kid.

I swore I’d never, ever, forget The Sparrow, that I’d kick anybody’s ass who tried to stop me from sailing her, that I would starve and be homeless if that’s what it took to keep her afloat.  I got to be starved and homeless plenty after that fall, but I never got to do it for The Sparrow.  It was not romantic or for a cause, it was just the cards life dealt me, and I think that’s what I didn’t understand when I was a kid.  Though I had been homeless on and off throughout my teenage years, I thought when grown-ups were homeless they must be doing it for something, because once you turned 18 and your parents or child services couldn’t tell you what to do anymore, you were free.  Or maybe I just couldn’t accept that I was already a grown up, and what I was living through was just practice for what was to come.

I didn’t have to choose that life.  There was a point when a family took me in, and I had a real home and loving parents.  For the first time in my life, I even got my own room, with my own bed, and a door I was allowed to close whenever I wanted.  I could have stayed.  I could have gone to Norwalk Community College and made friends and left the rest behind.  I could have even continued sailing The Sparrow, maybe.  But I never thought about that.  Though I no longer had to dream away living in hell, there was a pain in my heart from everything that happened to me that even the hope for next sailing season couldn’t take away.  I couldn’t see that I finally had everything I needed, all I felt was pain, so I did the one thing all that bouncing around with child services taught me to do, I ran away.

I thought I’d come back to The Sparrow.  That’s how I reasoned that it would be okay.  But then again, I also thought I could just come home whenever I wanted to.  I didn’t realize you could get stuck places back then, or that life would move on without me.  I was a cocky 19 year old who thought I’d lived so much that nothing could possibly hurt me anymore, I’d already lived through it all anyway.  I stepped back out onto the road, past the magical 18^th birthday, without the slightest thought that I could possibly fail.  But then again, I never thought I could leave my Sparrow, too.  

I started out good.  For the first 6 months I was in New York City working for Grassroots Campaigns raising money for the ASPCA, that’s how I got into activism.  I met Joe Wilson there and left with him for San Diego in August of 2010.  I was 20 years old.  When we first got out there I got in good with a captain at a new sailing school and he let me race with them once a week.  I was ecstatic, my dream had come true.  I was finally a racer, learning the skills I needed to fix The Sparrow and take her around the world.  But then Joe went crazy, ranting about aliens and the end of the world, and we had to break up, and the pain came back even worse than before, because this time I was all alone on what felt like the other side of the world.  I had a great job and great friends but I threw it all away one day.  I ran away again and I haven’t raced since.  

The years following that are a strange delirium of the road.  I bounce around a lot and I drink too much.  I tried killing myself for awhile, but they just put me in a hospital, and gave me a lot of drugs, and told me I’m not allowed to do that anymore.  So I kept on moving, never staying in one town for long.  They didn’t say Im not allowed to do that.  I’ve collected a repertoire of memories that make great stories in the bar: Running from Federalis in Mexico, Breaking into abandoned buildings in a ghost town, playing guitar on the streets of cities all across this country.  I tell them like a novel, a tale of adventure.  I am the narrator, not the main character.  I am a story, not a girl.  Though Im not sure why I tell them at all.

But I never tell them about sailing.  I don’t remember how.  I told myself I know nothing of leeward and windward long ago.  I call line rope, and cleats horns, and I never make the mistake of confusing right with starboard in casual conversation anymore.  I am not a sailor, that is for TV.  And my copies of Wind and Master and Commander collect dust in the bottom of my unpacked moving boxes where they belong. 

People ask me where I’m from and I’m not sure what to say anymore.  Sometimes I tell them the road, or just shrug and say “a lot of places.”  Sometimes I tell them Queens, cause that’s the simplest answer, but I barely lived there for a year.  Most of the time I try not to think about my life, but it’s hard because I’m all alone now and I’ve lost almost everything I used to own, and there is no hope for next season to dream it all away.  But I can stand outside the Tavern in this new town I’ve found myself and secretly remember.  I can still close my eyes for a moment, and that flag pole becomes Sparrow’s mast, the fallen leaves my luffing sails, the click clack of the pool table inside is a burst of spray across the bow, and I’m just a girl who believes in sailing ships again.

NY 6557 CE