Sail Away
by the Editor
Alice Nutter says something beautiful about the anarchist punk rock band Chumbawamba when she describes the band and the friends she made in it like this: “We’d run away to sea together and the ship had never sunk.”
I thought about this yesterday when Alex and I were sitting with two of our own friends, a joyfully married couple, talking quietly with them about the fatal and untreatable disease that’s taken hold of one of them. And I felt like we were on a ship at sea, the four of us standing in the prow on a gray cold day, wind kicking sea water up at our faces. I felt like we had set sail together when we had begun our friendship, having a destination in mind, but never knowing if we’d get there for sure. And I felt like we were laughing and crying now over how things hadn’t gone the way we’d planned. But that wasn’t what mattered. What mattered was we’d set out on that ship together and we were still on it. And it hadn’t just stayed safely in the harbor.
It seems to be easier to sail off that way with friends than with family. It seems much easier to be straight with the people you choose than with the people you’re born with, and maybe it’s that constant turning away from being straight that keeps the family firmly on land. One thing I noticed in talking with EAP’s writers this month was how difficult most found it to say really truthful things about their own families. It felt like a betrayal to all of us. Of course, this has to do with fear — most small dishonesties do — fear of losing someone. With friends you can take that kind of risk. And it’s the taking of that kind of risk that keeps the relationship alive, and keeps it sailing away.
It seems to me that the best thing we can do is learn from our friends how to make friends out of our own families. We can be loyal to them without being blind. And we can be kind.
We’re all of us, anyway, family and friends, in the same boat. And it is so important to sail and see where we get to together. So maybe the best thing is just to throw as much extra baggage overboard and set out, as bravely as we can manage, onto that sea.