I just got off a cruise ship.
“You’re getting on a cruise ship?”
It’s the fourth text I’ve gotten like this. My friends, my boss, members of my family I hardly talk to reach out to tell me this is crazy. That I might end up stuck at sea like the people on the Grand Princess, that it’s just a tub full of germs and I’ll catch something at the salad bar.
I ignore them. I placate them. I know how badly I need this. I’ve gotten to the point where I flinch every time the phone rings. My immediate reaction to anything requiring my attention or my effort is to consider how I’d rather die than do that thing. Overwhelm doesn’t begin to cover it. I’m not burnt out; I’m ash scattered on the wind. I’m not writing and there’s nobody home. I’ve got to get away for a while.
And regular away won’t cut it. I haven’t been offline for more than a day at a time in years. Burning Man 2016 was the last time I was significantly away from the internet; they put up a cell tower in Gerlach. There’s nowhere to go to unplug. Yes, I know I could affect my own digital isolation through self-discipline. Thank you for pointing that out. Your feedback has been noted.
Cruise ship wifi exists, but it’s of such poor quality that I’d never bother paying for it. Especially when I’m so desperate to disconnect. The cruise I’ve gone on for the last few years is the JoCo Cruise; a boatload of nerds coalesced around internet sensation Jonathan Coulton and includes a lineup of authors, artists, and podcasters who tell jokes about the Mandelbrot set and Star Wars or play the cello. It’s the same as any sing-along science fiction convention with a lot of theater kids, but on a boat.
I wanted all that. So I went.
It was as glorious as it always is. I sang through the entire book of Hamilton with a live band and people who have it memorized. We all cried when it was quiet uptown, we all pretended we can rap. I colored in a book of mandalas on the deck, with the wind riffling my pages. I drank themed cocktails (Thirst of May) and danced to Jean Grae and MegaRan. I went ashore in the Dominican Republic and got incredibly sunburned swimming in the clear blue Caribbean. Long skinny silver fish with iridescent spots slipped past my skin as I bobbed in the waves and tried to forget my real life existed.
Bobbing along with me were geeks from all over the world who desperately wanted the same. We asked around until we found someone with an Erdos number. We recommended books to each other while nearby someone floated on their back, reading a Kindle in the water. We talked about everything but what was going on back home.
Nobody on board had any symptoms of flu or anything like it. No one was confined to quarters. The real infected among us were the ones who had signed up for the onboard internet. They brought their particles of contagion to the ship-wide messaging system, and the bits that we got were alarming and bizarre. Travel bans in Europe, but no clue as to whether our Europeans friends would be prevented from flying home. Rumors of a confirmed COVID-19 case at our embarkation point, but not someone working for our cruise line. Day by day, the seas got rougher and the news grew more strange. Ships launched after ours were cut off and sent home early. Were we the last cruise ship in the Caribbean? The last one ever? Would we, too, be sent home early? Would we be permitted to disembark?
With this uncertainty and the knowledge that we’d return to nations hunkering down for plague, the mood onboard grew restless and risky. Someone created a forum that functioned like Tinder on the ship's free intranet and open season on hookups was declared. This particular group is heavily queer and maybe 30-40% polyamorous. The first one of these I went on in 2017 arranged a polyam happy hour in one bar that rapidly spilled out into the atrium of the ship, filling most of a deck and overwhelming the bartenders. The truth seems to be that the whole boat is a poly happy hour, but this was the first year I could feel it coming off everyone’s skin as they secreted into corners, up to the observation deck, or stole away to cabins in the night. I could hear people fucking from my room's verandah at any hour of the day.
Last days of Pompeii and why not? We’ve all lived through a succession of dispiriting and grief-inducing years. We’re returning to uncertainty and quarantine. Why not screw indiscriminately and put out a Christmas stocking full of condoms on your stateroom door? Propositions grew bold and a the kind of wanton DTFery emerged that I haven’t experienced since I learned to dance in a sweaty gymnasium in junior high.
One friend on the boat told me over breakfast that she was working on a laundry list of the type of hookups she’d had and would like to have. She was sleeping in a bunk with two other people, all three of them fucking each other. Plus a punch card of locals and out-of-towners, unusual acts and the usual ones done in different ways and new places. People at nearby tables perked into our conversation, offering their own goals and accomplishments, admitting that they too were seeking to bury their anxieties in nests of flesh.
What were we warding off? I thought about Pompeii again, picturing the legend whose ash-blown eternal form was captured in the moment of defiantly grinding one out as the blast hit him. Time only seems to stop when we touch, when we kiss. The infinite is only within reach when we're in love. It’s an illusion, but it’s a ceaselessly popular one.
When we came back to our port in Florida, my phone caught a signal for the first time in a week and buzzed for ten minutes straight. I didn’t want the news or the emails. I wanted the texts from the people I loved, the ones who had told me I was crazy for going in the first place. I wanted to connect with them, tell them my boat had been cleared and I was coming home. I wanted to be back in touch, but not back in the world. Turns out you don’t get to choose.
The shelves of my grocery store are empty. Easter balloons drift above the denuded expanse, trailing ribbons and streamers over the holes where the rice and beans should be. I watch folks load up their carts in a panic and I think back to the people on the boat trying to get it while they can. I think about scarcity and the way we pretend love is governed by it.
When my plane landed in San Francisco, it was full of people from my cruise. We had all known one another by our sunburned faces and our cruise band t-shirts. We had offered each other sick bags and back pats when the plane hit monstrous turbulence over Texas. Surely this was no worse than what we had already faced, what we were about to face. Rough air and heaving seas and bad news had been smoothed out by the careless caresses we had shared; we could certainly hold each other now through the terror that played out across all the elements in our lives.
Back on earth as we waited for our gate, our plane abruptly lost power. We sat in the dark and the close, unmoving air less than a second before someone spoke. It was a woman’s voice, and I know she was one of us. Without missing a beat, she spoke confidently into the daunting darkness, offering the only remedy that seems to cure what ails us.
“Who wants to make out?”
Wanting,
Meg