En route to Brazil, here is what I am thinking:

These are the first lines I am able to write since we left Barbados. Down below in the saloon under a little night light, keeping my leg wrapped around the legs of the table so I don’t roll off the seat, I try to hold myself up to write. It is almost midnight, a night of full moon it seems and I can’t sleep. We are on the Atlantic, sailing between Latin America and Africa, East/Southeast towards the inter-tropical convergence zone where winds from the northern and southern hemisphere meet. We will cross the equator soon. Now, we are sailing in the dark only with the light of the moon. Fish accidentally end up jumping on deck. We try to save them, we throw them back so they can continue their journey.

We continue ours. We squeeze lime juice into our bowls of rice and truly appreciate the concentrated memory of the land. Just like a drop of lime juice or a grain of sand dried onto our deck after the rain - sand maybe from the deserts of Africa - we also become concentrated, boiled down to our essence. So far from everything the truth comes to the surface. Notions like “love”, “family”, a “purpose in life”… take on a different, somehow more real meaning. It is as simple as having to go away to know where home is or being away from people we love to know what we truly feel. Now, we listen. We travel through the water towards ourselves.