Here, there was no such moment coming.
The peace was not a break between crises.
The peace was just the weather now.
I saw them sometimes from the upper decks.
Without the drink packages, they were paying out of pocket for every soda, which set Brynn and Landon bickering constantly over a shared card.
Without Wi-Fi, my mother couldn’t post the photos that were, I had come to understand, the entire point of a vacation for her — the proof of a life, more important than the living of it.
Without the excursions, they stood in long humid lines for the public shuttles at every port.
They were, in short, having the vacation they had actually paid for, which was to say the one I had stopped paying for.
The difference between their trip and mine was, precisely, me.
It always had been.