You are sitting down in the bow looking far, far away until the end of the sea. The cold wind hits you chilling your bones. You have a drink on your side, your memories on the other. A thousand of voices from a thousand places; another thousand people around you going and going. If you look at them, everyone is fighting a war inside. Take it for granted, nobody is winning.
You take another zip of your drink swallowing it as the last drop in a desert where nobody hears you. The voices still around, haunted cries in a metallic Babylon.
Getting into a song, you close your eyes. The ‘Diamond Sea’ plays through your earphones bringing back more memories, creating new ones from this day.
Somebody gets close to you; ask a question, most likely if I have a lighter or matches. Perhaps, as a rare event, that one will going to bring up a small part of her life, just a glance of the living part as a valve that gets the steam out to avoid explosion; to avoid madness. You just listen. What else can you do?
Waves hits the metallic hull, bringing you and the thousands of hundreds tons of metal up, then you go down hitting back the sea. You can hear the splash of the water and the trembling of the iron in the ongoing battle between the things made by metal, doomed to be rusted and the immensity of the ocean. You just close your eyes and let yourself go with this never ending pitch.
Then you open your eyes again, and the blue sky is there, cottoned by centuries of clouds resembling all the shapes that you can imagine. If is during the night, then trillions of stars opens to you in the shadow of the sky. Above you can follow the Milky Way, the sane that Magellan, the Arawacks and Colon followed once, back in the time of the real men.
Perhaps that day you were watching the news, just a little bit earlier and they were talking about Igor, Earl and others. Then you go out and there they are, building up just in front of your eyes.
A vortex of spinning clouds overweighed with steam and drops clashing each other. Enormous white, gray and and black, very dark gray towers going up to twenty thousand feet high releasing lightning bolts and chilly rain. All around from starboard to portside the vessel looks like a white carcass swallowed by a violent grayness on a shadowed blue and winded sea. If you try to make your way to the very end of the bow the wind and rain blinds you pushing you back.
In an average day though, you can stand there, then you’ll find yourself in front of three hundred meters of white painted metal with over three thousand of other souls behind you pushed forward by six huge engines, each one with the size of your house.
And the sea is coming towards you passing under your feet and you can hear the splash and foam disappearing behind gone forever, to come again.
There, the wind blows on your face washing everything out. You close your eyes again and whatever can happen in your head, you can feel like the ancient Icarus looking down flying with wings made of wax.
You see and feel things that no one else can see and feel. Even if you try hard can’t be explained. And then you’re living this life, the ship’s life on the Diamond Sea. If you know the song and this place, you might know what I mean.
