Through the night the boat hummed and heaved and she lay restlessly mere inches beneath the ceiling in a tight upper bunk. Bound in, the cabin: a cell.
Underneath the sea rolled and the passage of the boat left the past behind. Ahead a future waited with the grey dawn, without fanfare or welcome on the shore to mark this foreign arrival.
And within? What was happening within? There too, a new beginning. The old of youth being left behind and an arriving at the borders of adulthood. It too, unfamiliar… unknown. Yet, such significance was overshadowed, a mere footnote within their migrancy of the collective body. So much change on the outside, her changes within were buried, overlooked. No fanfare or ritual here either. Awkward glances were the welcome of this bleeding.
It was merely understood and expressed as a by-product of the intense stress of this passage - her adulthood, her womanhood, beginning on the eve of departure. If it should have been an immense moment, it was lost. Lost in the greater swell of change. Now her body was a cabin moving forward without bidding, beyond her control. She could no sooner leave her body than she could this boat. But truth be told, all of this would bring loss of control. But neither she, nor they, could see in the act of passage the unravelling that lay ahead, of the endings that would outnumber their beginnings, of the trials that would be their undoing.
And so here she lay in the dark of a silent severing. Faced these changes of nation and body in fear as tight as the fist that gripped the stiff sheets. Did she know which rite made her heart pound harder? As if to underscore the loss of childish familiarity she found herself on the boat with no mother present to care and advise. No female hand to reassure or comfort.
Thrust into the uncontrollably insecure as an adult-becoming there was only the unknown.It was a foretaste of the journey to come. This pioneer resettling was the start of a life in which she would perpetually fear futures from which she could not turn back, of things set in motion that she could not master. From here on in nothing would be the same. Was it a shared experience? Did her father and brother in the bunks below carry fears like her own? If they did, it was not uttered. She wanted to cling to them but instead trembled alone.
Her mother would follow and she would leave something of her sanity behind in the passage across the sea, just as the daughter left her childhood. How alike they were, both gripped by fear, both clinging and shrinking back from the new, always smiling and pretending to be coping when inside they were screaming. Not wanting to disappoint and never uttering how frightening the unknown-ness could feel.
The sea was rolling and heaving. It was making her queasy. But the boat would not stop. The change would not stop. No captaincy of one's destiny; someone else was always at the helm. The only known was the persistent unstoppable arrival of an invisible, unknowable and unfamiliar future. In the open water, the boat. In the boat, a cabin. In the cabin a bed. In the bed, a body. In the body, a girl. Within and without there was nothing but unstoppable splitting and breaking.
::
written in mid May, 2006, this reflection was an attempt to describe the early hours of 1 september 1987 - the night i emmigrated across the irish sea. i began menstruation hours before leaving my family home for the journey. i was 13. it is of no surprise that it is written in the third person... it marked my first spoken honest acknowledgement of the overwhelming nature of the experience... of its significance in my narrative, in real and symobilc terms... it is unlikely to be the last...
LB,x
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