On Leaving the Water

I finally sold the boat.

It’s strange how a sentence that simple can carry years inside it — years of plans, detours, storms, small triumphs, and not-so-small heartbreaks. The boat wasn’t just a thing I owned. It was the shape of a dream I once had for myself. A dream of movement, travel, simplicity. A dream of a life stripped down to essentials: Wind, water, a good horizon, and a sense that anything could still happen.

For a long time, the boat represented freedom. It was a kind of refuge, too. A place where the noise of the world dropped away and I could hear myself again. The summer evenings anchored in the bay. The gulls. The nights I slept on the water. The feeling that even if nothing else in my life was quite settled, this at least was mine.

But the past few years weren’t exactly gentle. Two relationships, both intense in their own ways, knocked the wind out of my sails more than I wanted to admit. Both had moments of incredible connection, and both left shadows I’m still learning to walk out of. The last one especially colored the boat with memories I didn’t ask for: arguments that happened onboard and half way across the world at the same time, nights I came back to the cabin exhausted in ways that had nothing to do with sailing, days when being on the boat stopped feeling like escape and started feeling like grief.

I didn’t realize it at first, but somewhere along the way the boat had become part of the story I was trying to survive. Not part of the story I wanted to live.

So selling it and finally handing over the keys felt like closing the last chapter of a book I’ve been re-reading for too long. There’s relief in that. A sense of space opening. And yet, there’s a sadness too. Because the boat wasn’t just wood and fiberglass. It carried the version of me who believed the next adventure was always waiting just beyond the next crossing. It held the part of me that still believed dreams were simple: sell the boat, move to Europe, maybe build a life there with someone I loved.

Life didn’t unfold the way I pictured it. Some dreams cracked under the weight of reality… and cruelty and betrayal. Some dreams I had to let go of before they swallowed me whole. They’d already turned into a nightmare.

But selling the boat feels like more than just parting with an object. It feels like leaving an era. In some ways, it feels like leaving her behind too. Not the person herself, but the hold she had over my heart. The constant judgment, the punishment cycles, the feeling of being on trial. While she allowed herself almost everything. There’s something bittersweet in that: like stepping off a ship that kept me afloat and dragged me under at the same time.

Now there’s the new life coming. A life on land again. A life without the old fantasies weighing on me. A life where I can build something steady, maybe quieter, but real. I’m not sure where it will take me. Germany, elsewhere, or somewhere entirely unexpected, but for the first time in a long time, the horizon feels open again.

Selling the boat hurt a little. It healed something too.

It’s an ending. And finally, it’s a beginning.