Whelp. Here I am, all by me onesie. In the early light in my cockpit perch with my coffee and book nearby, things are wonderful. Watching my family zoom away on the ferry yesterday while I stood on the dock, feeling drained of all of the important things, the further away they went? Less wonderful.
The emotional shell that I was came home and wept at the space that was so big now, the space that should have been filled with their things, their crumbs, their arguments and giggles, their hulking bodies in tight spaces… Chickadee has never known a time without us all, save for Andy’s first work trip in the yard before she was launched and actually, before she was Chickadee.
It turns out that a big part of my separation anxiety was having my people traveling all day. Every time I got a text that they had landed at the next airport, I breathed a bit easier. Three cheers for Flightradar24, and staying up until 1:30am making sure they’d made it home safely.
For distraction while they moved up the coast, the pragmatist in me shortly thereafter dried the tears and got to work. I took laundry in, scoured the galley, and ticked off a number of chores on my list. The kicker is this: I cleaned and swept the boat around noon, and it’s still clean. It’s a crazy thing, really. Every time I got back into the bunk and did my routine wipe-the-bottoms-of-my-feet-so-as-to-not-get-sand-in-the-sheets, there was nothing on them. I could get used to this!
