S
luggish feet touch the water.
Oil draws purple and green designs on the water’s surface.
Between cans, buckets, a car tire, parts of a rusty old bike and other trash which someone considered themselves justified to toss into the sea, a gooey grey bottom is glimpsed. One little fish can be observed, otherwise, all is dead.
The fresh, clear saltwater on the island I left this morning crosses my mind.
So full of life and energy.
All the healing baths from the bosom of Mother Earth. All the nights when the only thing to provide relief to the panic-stricken screams of pain was her cool breath blowing softly on my broken body, where it lay motionless on the veranda outside my bungalow.
In a deserted clearing in the jungle, there lay my bungalow. From my cabin I could hear the trees whispering when the breeze aired their leaves. They whispered of comfort. They donated generously from their roots’ wisdom and from their life-giving oxygen. They gave me back my breath and my faith.
And Duangkamol, the woman who owned this small resort on the island, who came with a fresh coconut and bathed my wounds with herbal poultices every morning at exactly 4 a.m. It was at that time her poultices were the most effective on my wounds, she implied.
A rooster crows.
Smoke from someone burning what they no longer want causes me to want to cough, but I cannot. It hurts too much.
My body twitches when someone places their hand on my shoulder. What feels like a knife stabbing my right side distorts my face and causes my left hand to instinctively move there once again.
“But here you are, dangling your legs on the pier while the rest of us are waiting in the restaurant!”
He laughs artificially.
“Janek, is that you?”
I try to turn round, but find it too painful while sitting, so slowly get myself to my feet. He wonders if I need help. Some hesitancy in his voice awakens my concern.
I thank him but decline and tell him I’m fine. He grimaces when he sees my scars and my right side.
“That look worries me,” I say and hug him carefully.
He hugs back a bit too hard and I realise he hasn’t understood my broken bones are not yet entirely healed.
“Worried? No, there’s no reason to be worried. Valentina does mean strength, doesn’t it? And Janek means God’s mercy. The perfect combination for this journey!”
He laughs again, artificially and wipes the sweat from his brow with his forearm.
My face is reflected in his sunglasses. His words do not appear to have bestowed the confidence for which I had hoped.
He is changed from when last we met in Bali, two years ago.
I had been there with my parents during Christmas and been fascinated by this brave adventurer and sailor from Poland. He had quit his job and sold his home in order to move to Australia. Once there he bought a boat to live on and to sail ‘wherever the winds carried him’, as he expressed it. He made his living by taking other adventurous boaters with him. And he had suggested already then that I ought to stay in Indonesia and go with him on his boat. But that Christmas in Bali I was longing back to England and my boyfriend whom I’d just met.
A relationship that lasted two years. A relationship I was convinced would last to the end of time. I was completely heartbroken when he suddenly and unexpectedly broke up with me.
I possessed sufficient contact with myself to conceive the wise decision of undertaking a journey on my own to India, which I had long wanted to do rather than allowing the mental history of ‘how it ought to have been’ to entirely take me over in my emotionally weakened condition.
Janek and I had sporadic email contact since our meeting in Bali. I was still impressed with his courage and inspired by his life of freedom.
When I told him I was in India, he posed the question again if I wanted to go with him on a sailing trip. He said it would do me good and that my knowing nothing at all about sailing did not matter a bit, or that my only experience of boating were a few short trips on my grandparents’ motorboat in Croatia when I was a child.
I accepted without hesitation. And we decided I would go to Thailand and meet with him and the other two also sailing on this trip.
However, that was before the accident.
Before everything that came afterwards.
Before my body torn asunder and the feeling that every bone holding it together had been broken.
Before God’s safety net burst and I fell through.
Before my faith in life disappeared.