Transitional Meanderings, London to Punta Del Este

A story to be written. In my last therapy session before I set sail, i told Mark that I knew that to sail the world was not a thing to bring me a cure to my trauma or to my brokenness. I felt it would give me an opportunity to reframe my perspective of myself. Sitting in the airport departure complex, aged nearly 49 years old, I was aware of how little shame I felt. That years before I would bend under the mantle of not good enough and core wrongness. But something has changed. I am not better than these people, rather, I feel I have achieved something that sets me apart, in a good way, it's a positive thing. I am grateful to my former self and proud of my achievements in what sometimes felt like the impenetrable cliff face of adversity. Madrid International Airport. It feels later than it is. My eyes are tired and my breath a little laboured as I struggle to climatise to an environment where there's nothing natural, nothing green and nothing healthy to eat. The queue at Starbucks is as long as the queue at the ladies, topping up and peeing out whilst the euros run into the till. I man-hauled an 80 litre kitbag across London, 24.5 kgs that bought a sweat to my brow on an already warm day. The air thick and humid, I sat under a canopy and shared some precious last moments together with my daughter before my onward journey to Gatwick Airport. I arrived here in this desert of goodness, ate 5 cereal bars for my late night pre flight dinner. A large group surrounded a TV, Brasil against Belgium. South American countries have toppled repeatedly at the hands of the European teams and I wonder has the warm blood of these countries finally run dry, leaving the remainder of the games to the Occidentals? Two hours to my flight to Montevideo, my phone charges, a guy with a beard keeps catching my eye, perhaps he likes me, I'm not a man's man and I used to get chatted up by boys in northern clubs when I was just eighteen. So, I contemplate, the writing of a book that somehow reflects my actualisation. How did it happen that on the chair opposite to me there is a jacket that I bought with me especially to sail in the Southern Ocean? How did I arrive from a near drowning in a sea of alcohol and spiritual bankruptcy to a vista from where I feel I can see the whole of the world, where I can sense its shape, it's roundness and its distance? And how do I write a travel book? Do I start and continue thus, with a narration that embraces every step and every detail, lest my mind forgets, like a negative that fades away, bowing subservient to the erosive pattern of time? Do I plant a flagged stake at every corner, every twist and turn in the road? I sit here at this small round corner table, I chose it for the charging point for the phone. Patterned floor tiles in cream and brown with a rusty red, stretching out to the counters that have a continuous flow of customers. The baristas shout out the names, people coming and people going, pulling cases on wheels that follow obediently, looking at small screens and chatting on same said devices. The green and white Starbucks emblem that looks to me like a mermaid, or a queen that has thrown up her hands in a state of surrender, or maybe she's going to hold her head in a growing state of panic, or of madness? Nine hours in, we claw our way towards the line of light that falls across the land bringing dawn as the globe rotates. Somewhere over the giant landmass that calls itself Brasil, on the map, 450 mph which makes a madness of a small sailboat such as mine that travels one hundred times slower, with a swish and a heeling burble. The only movement we get in here is a little turbulence. On the plane in the gloom, people wander dispossessed, the latch of the lavatory clicking and the occasional whine of a small child at the rear. There's a man up front, so fat that his hips are splayed and his legs strut out either side of a bulk that melts and sways like a giant flopping tethered balloon between two posts, his form spreads over two seats, he is a fascination and an insult which draws my compassion and my morbid disgust, we all have our crosses to bear, many are subtly hidden, some are not. The small TV screen looks upon me from the seat in front of mine, it's offering from the previous night unfinished, it has caught a frame that looks a scene from an oil painting of old, where a man looks out with a mixture of fear, disbelief and despair. If I press play again, it will be an unpalatable breakfast for my mind, a Hollywood dross that deadens and distracts more than inspires. To my left there is a man lying, stretched out over four seats, his lucky check in allocation ensures that he has a good nights sleep on a plane that appears to be half empty. I was half lucky, I won two seats to call my own. Shoehorning myself in for some snatched comfort but mainly stretching my neck and getting pressure sores at different parts of my body. I was thinking about the plane. We few hundred people in this tiny tube hurtling through the sky leaving just a signature of spent aviation fuel like an invisible line across the sky. In a surrounding environment that would kill us instantly, we are maintained by a constant feed of cooled oxygenated air that circulates in our midst. And of course we breath out carbon dioxide and we fart and burp out our gases too, a soupy mix that connects us all. I never thought of it like this before and I'm not sure I'm comfortable with such a degree of intimate connection with complete strangers. Uruguay arrival. We continue to plummet and the cloud shows no sign of thinning until we drop below a thousand feet. The wings of the plane flex and wobble at the ends and little rivulets of water start to stream horizontally across my little window to the world. We make our way down to the city into the gloom, it's wet, grey and raining. The urgency of my hunger drives me to a coffee stand and I satiate with media lunas and a hot drink. The sun came up an hour before but it's so wet and cloudy that it still seems dark. The arrivals hall is plunged into a gloom which takes on a chill as I take my first breathes of fresh air in over 12 hours. Outside people hurry and scuttle hunched under umbrellas from the falling deluge, the car headlights in the drop off zone reflect from the sheet water surface of the tarmac with a glare. Water cascades from the roof and the wind blows in a fine spray where I sit waiting for the bus that will take me to Punta Del Este. My warm sailing jacket is useful now and I wonder about digging in my pack for my gloves as the chill sets in to my fingers. The coach arrives and a few of us move out into the rain, the driver's companion hurriedly taking the luggage to stow below. I am number 29, next to a young lad that looks confused when I exclaim "lluvia!" whilst motioning outside. He has a nice smile and I doubt very much that I would understand his local dialect Spanish. With all of the windows steamed up we head south east and I realise how comfortable I feel relaxing in a climate that's not boiling and not freezing. How can a transition that seemed so smooth bare it’s teeth and become so savage? It’s just past five in the afternoon and it’s getting dark already, the wind howls outside the walls of the apartment block, where I stay, the occasional rattle on the window and some rogue rain drops spatter on the glass. The heating is on in the flat but I still feel the cold, I took a siesta that gave way to two and a half hours of sleep and now I feel fractured and disorientated as the day rapidly draws itself up with the onset of darkness. I put on another jersey and shiver inwardly against the growing sense of cold. Since yesterday the soft warmth and elongated twilight of the northern summer has fallen away to reveal a harshness with a wind battered South Atlantic gale, the sea ravishing the beach like a dancing clawing monster devouring any sense of calm. I look out through the glass, the only thing that separates me from the fury, feeling the cold run through me, the Northern Summer snatched away leaving me feeling exposed and vulnerable. The dawn seemed to take an age to come. I lay in my bed with an extra jersey and an extra blanket, the window knocking and tapping, becoming worse as the night wore on, the wind building, becoming a hiss and then a moan with occasional screams. This morning I look out over the ocean and the sea is in a furious state with a crust of white, broiling and spuming, breaking onto the ochre coloured sands, where wild dogs wander like some strange animals on a prairie, slowly picking their way along the dunes, sometimes stopping and sitting, no hurry, nowhere to be. At first I look for a man or a master, but they are out there alone. Who else would have the strength or courage to be out in this maelstrom? With just three millimetres of glass that stands between me and the untameable forces outside I am humbled. I cannot avoid taking notice of the thin veil between my physical body, my fragile mind, and the wildness that would consume me within seconds. There is a drama similar to that on a sailboat, when so many senses are being plied simultaneously that leaves one feeling raw and exposed. Perhaps this is the feature of my transition, that I came form the warm golden twilight of a soft embrace to a seizing of primordial elements that seem to batter the senses, even from the safety of the apartment.