Onboard

“Possibilities,” she said, smoothing the deck railing with her palm. Her eyes brushed the span of sea around her like it was a creased skirt that needed fussing. “You can have an ocean of possibilities.”

“Stars?” he offered. “Space is just another deep place where you can’t breathe and you have to wear a funny suit.”

They were on a ship crossing from Oslo, in Norway, to a small port town near the northern tip of Denmark. The starboard side of the ship looked out on the North Sea and the port side currently faced the Baltic, despite it all just looking like endless water to them.

“Yeah, a sea of stars. Also crops? Sunflowers.” He started singing, smiling, shooting her a sideways look that was all dimples and eye creases in the reflected light “...an ocean of violets in bloom.”

“It isn’t just oceans, it’s all bodies of water,” she said. “When my aunt died, my uncle kept saying the house was ‘swamped in flowers’ and I didn’t understand why flowers made him feel like he was underwater.”

“Hm. We perceive the world as if we’re drenched. Is it the repetition or the abundance that makes us do it?” he asked. “Everything is a water metaphor. It’s making me feel waves of emotion.”

He said the last part in an exaggerated way, swaying from side to side, brushing her arm. He gave another grin, awkward, not sure how joking about emotion would go over after her mentioning a family death. She seemed unaffected.

They had just met in the bar. Single travelers, they were both somehow more aware of themselves when against this unfamiliar backdrop yet less able to see themselves as familiar. Being adrift on a sea with an identity crisis had brought them out to deck to look for defining markers. The water was indifferent to their goal.

“I’m still stuck on possibilities being a takeaway from this monotony, how did never-ending ever say possibility to anyone?” she said. “You need to combine two things to make something new, I mean you need discrete inputs, right? Sea plus sea just equals more sea, more sea.”

She mentally stitched the seam of the horizon in a short length gauge so it wouldn’t unravel and gap. As much as the stretch of same seemed lonely, the thought of something seeping in at the meeting point was terrifying. She then tried to baste the North Sea to the Baltic in a loose zig zag, but couldn’t identify a line.

“Let’s move to the front of the ship?” she asked.

He nodded, and they started walking in the uneven-legged gate that happens from a ship rising to shorten a step unexpectedly, or dropping away mid-stride. They laughed at one another.

“If we’re mostly water and pulled like a tide this shouldn’t be so tricky,” he said.

He made his first attempt to touch her hand but she moved her arm out as if to balance. They landed at a spot that looked out over the rope deck above the bow, and could see the ship cutting through water, dividing it this way and that. He was standing on her left.

“Right, so, I represent the Baltic. All this water coming by my side,” he said.

“So, I am the North Sea? It sounds so cold and boring,” she said.

“No, you are Edinburgh! You are eventually London up the River Thames,” he said. “And I, I bring Faberge eggs from St. Petersburg and cloudberry jam from Helsinki.”

“I’m sure some mermaids hanging out ‘round Amsterdam are hoarding your sparkly eggs and wishing their toast weren’t soggy,” she said, “relationships are tricky.”

He moved his hand closer to hers on the railing, touched her pinky, tried to divert attention from the move by lifting his face into the wind and gulping air, smiling.

“And while you’re tucked into a form, I’m a shape shifter, I keep going, I become the North Atlantic, the South Atlantic, the South Pacific, on and on, chain of the same. It’s like I keep having to reinvent myself to get attention,” she said, and then looked at him. “So where are you going, when we dock in Fredrikshavn, are you going to Skagen?”

Skagen, at the northernmost tip of Denmark, was a bus ride from that port city to the Southeast.

“I’m not sure, actually, I was thinking of going down to Aalborg, there’s a train, or a bus to a train, I need to look at the app. Why are you going to Skagen, what are you doing there?” he asked.

“The light. Chasing the light,” she said.

“Light is everywhere,” he said, laughing a little.

“Hm. Yes, kind of like this all-over water . . . or fear, or anger . . .” she started.

“Hey, no, sorry, what’s special about the light?” he asked.

“It’s painters’ light, the way the land there dwindles down to just a tip sticking into the sea means so much reflective landscape, maybe? The light is said to be extraordinarily bright, translucent, um, clarifying,” she said.

“Sounds like it would be hard not to be cheerful, there,” he offered.

“It would be hard not to see, I think,” she laughed, “what is right in front of you. The paintings are delicious, boys in the surf, women by hollyhocks, that kind of thing. I just want to feel it, feel myself in it, I guess.”

He reached for her hand for real this time, thinking it was the moment, imagining the warmth of skin on skin in this chilled northern air. She froze for a moment, left her hand limp, pulled it away.

“I’m sorry, I’m going to go nap until we arrive, Baltic,” she said, and walked away toward the signs pointing to doors to inner places.

The next day in Skagen, she swam through the light past impossibly ochre buildings, luminous-cheeked children, flowers the colors of lipstick in a dream. She was pulled by a tide of people to follow the few miles of trails and then the last mile of white, sea-laced beach to arrive at the northernmost point, the whittled tip of the land where the two seas visibly collided.

She waded out, Baltic to her right, North to her left, her body soaked in light, crumpets crashing with Matryoshka dolls, and in front of her the braid, the frothy braid of the seas, not a lonely expanse, but the world’s water holding hands.