With a glass of rose on day one. Easy to savor the journey when your body still feels like it’s on one.
I don’t get motion sick. I can ride any roller coaster, sit anywhere in a car and read while it is in motion. Ride any sea-going vessel on a choppy sea. Never an issue.
Well, until I am home. And then I am not sick; I am just still on the ship. Or, my body thinks it is. I notice it first after my honeymoon, eleven days at sea. And then for a week after, while my body struggles to comprehend that I am not still at sea. But I am thinking about this in bed, this morning, feeling like I am on a ship (a week after I’ve gotten off it, again), and I have a memory of being a little girl in New Jersey, playing all day in the ocean. And with only the sunscreen that the seventies has to offer1. I lie in my bed at night and feel the waves washing over me rhythmically, like I am still in the ocean. So maybe my honeymoon is not the first time, exactly.
I google sea legs this morning (still feeling like I am on a ship, a week later). It usually goes away after two days (not for me) and the most likely people to experience it are women between thirty and sixty (that is me). they don’t know why it affects some people and not others. It actually has a fancy french name, which I guess is the opposite of mal de mer - mal de debarquement. Bad disembarkment?2 As maladies go it is not the worst.
It also feels like a reminder, a reminder and a soft landing. It makes me think of my honeymoon, coming home tan in April, springing directly into Easter with the kids. Two years ago, doing silent disco on a ship with a bunch of teenagers on spring break. Three years ago, singing karaoke on the last night as we cruise toward Amsterdam and afterward, still swaying as we see The Night Watch in the Rijksmuseum. And last Friday, watching the North Sea with my friends and talking until almost midnight.
I sway back and forth with a phantom ship, and can almost feel my husband putting sunscreen on my back. This debarquement isn’t feeling so mal to me, really.
I talk to my therapist on Thursday and tell her I have learned a lot on vacation. I have learned that two weeks feels like the perfect time to be gone. I have learned that the voices in my head that say that this is an extravagant way to spend my money are not my voice - it’s okay to do this. I drive two paid-off cars that are both over a decade old, for Christ’s sake.3 I learn that some people think dashing off to The Hague on a train is an adventurous thing to do. That traveling by myself is, too.
But I also learn that when I open my door, my confused, jet-lagged body lugging the suitcase I am really, really tired of, I can feel my husband everywhere. It’s like putting on my coziest UGG slippers, but better. Being gone is wonderful, and coming home to feel the presence that I almost take for granted, also wonderful.
The week is a soft landing, only four days long, working from home for all of it. I like my job much better than I did the week before I left; I am back with new energy. It’s almost like that is why we take vacations. I finish a puzzle, still swaying. Catch up on podcasts with the swell of a phantom ship.
And wake up, rocking. With my eyes closed, it is easier to imagine that Mike’s legs are still entwined with mine.
Caribbean Sea, April 2017
Coppertone SPF 15
substack dos not think disembarkment is a word.
Repeat after me Blythe: YOU get to decide how YOU spend YOUR money.