It is time to leave the sea. I feel especially sad at leaving behind the ABs, Gunduz, Ismael, Simu, Pipa, the Indians, who bid us farewell as if we were soulmates. Simu puts our heavy suitcases inside one large gunny sack and asks for one of the cranes outside to bring it down from the deck. He makes us an offer to go down the same way but we take the stairs. Once on land, I watch our luggage slowly make its descent in style. I look up and shout to the master, “By the way, how do you get a haircut on the ship?” He shouts, “One of the Romanians always has a machine. But I don’t trust them with my hair.” That explains the wolverine hair-coat; his last port of call was over fifty days ago.

As we walk through the streets of Hong Kong, Lobo says, “Finally, I see girls and women. I had almost forgotten how they looked like.” The reality that our sea-borne journey is over finally strikes me when I enter the shoebox apartment that we are going to stay in. Within its confines, I yearn for the blue vastness.

We come back to Singapore by air. To fly seems pointless now; it is too fast a way to reach a destination. And when Lobo asks me what I want to have for dinner, I answer instinctively, “Omelettes.”

I don’t sleep well anymore; I need the sea’s cradle. As I toss and turn in my bed, I recall our visits to the bridge at night when the moment I opened its door, everything would be dark, pitch black, my pupils dilated in a flash and then nothingness. Slowly, my eyes would adjust, the faint green markings on the radar monitors, Venus, a handful of stars, then a million, the spray of the Milky Way. Then, a faint yellow spot. It will grow into one giant moon, reflected by the dark oil-like sea, a luminous highway. Against the moon, the smoke from the ship would form something that looks like The Pillars of Creation. The universe is playing this trick on me, bundling up and containing into these black boxy silhouettes all that forever marching forward, unstoppable economic growth, in search of excellence, just-in-time inventory management, blue ocean strategies; the material end-result of all these, smartphones, toys, apparels, processed meat, neon lights, and fireworks. The universe is hiding them from my eyes, luring me into a provocation to imagine a world without everything. I keep turning my head around, soaking in this primitive eternity. One night at the bridge, Ismael, had walked up to me and said softly, “I don’t want to be a seaman in my next life. It feels too lonely. How can I be away from my family when I am already so old? But sometimes, I see the moon, just like this, it’s beautiful.”