What a difference a bay makes...

Yesterday my yin and I went sailing with her second cousin, his wife, and my yin-in-law. It was my first, and last, free Saturday for quite some time, and the next two weeks promise to be a blur of wedding preparations, thesis revisions, garlic-infused music festivals, presentations on Hemingway, lectures on La jetée, unintentional rhymes and potential unavoidable insomnias.

But, for now, this is beside the point.

The point is that yesterday was my second time ever on a sailboat, and I couldn't help but think about the similarities and differences between them. If one were to balance the former against the latter, it would look something like this:

similarities to the left, differences to the right

In fact, other than the salt water, the jib line and mast, almost nothing was the same. I tried writing about it this morning:

[Nancy, San Francisco, summer 2005. One on, one off, an airport security checkpoint. She's unable to find her license, but she looks for it at the bottom of the brown plastic bottle once filled with small white pills. Apparently there's no cure for aerophobia.

I remember how embarrassed I felt. I remember how I wanted to go out our last night but she was too sick to leave the house. I remember worrying and wondering and knowing how she must appear to my family – how I refused to see what was so obvious to everyone else.

That day on the bay, which might have been so beautiful, was awkward and strange – just like every day with her. It's still stupefying that I could have ever mistaken such sadness and tragedy for love, that I could have ever called that sham of a marriage the rest of my life. To have had that experience and survived it is truly a gift because it has allowed me to know how dark, flawed and imperfect life and love and relationships can be...

But yesterday, now, what a difference a bay makes...]

Biscayne Bay, 2011

San Francisco Bay, 2005

regatta on the horizon, 2011

regatta off Alcatraz Island, 2005

the captain, 2011

the captain, 2005

my yin an I with our new singing bowl, 2011

i

m
age
miss
in
g
Nancy and I, 2005

4 questions, 1 answer

How does one measure the distance between then and now? How does one account for the things not seen? How does one understand the connection between that bay and person in 2005 to the bay and person in 2011? Does the truth lie in the missing images or the images missing?

Little more than pixels and memory:

the precision of one matched
by the infidelity of the other.