He's still following me fairly closely on social media

Yesterday, I started my day very early sitting on the concrete of the bridge with my niece as the sun rose waiting for my ship to pull into port. We talked some but we also spent many moments in silence. There was a chill in the air and a warmth from the sun as it rose over the building. The ship I was waiting on was the ship I was married on twenty years ago and also the one I would embark on that day.

I took a selfie once it had arrived in port, my hair disheveled from the wind and the fact that I hadn’t bothered to comb it as I rushed out to the port but I had a bright smile on my face. Even with the cloud of memories hanging over, there was a lot of excitement on this morning.

I posted that selfie to my Instagram Stories and then forgot about it as I got swept up in all the anticipation and excitement with embarkation day and seeing my parents for the first time since December. It wasn’t until mid-afternoon after I had checked in at my muster station that I took a moment to pause as strolled along the promenade.

I sat on a bench with the ship name carved in its back and I opened my Instagram app to see what interactions I had received from both my story and a time lapse I also had posted this morning. In the list of viewers of my story, my ex-husband’s name appeared. So I sat a little longer. 

I wasn't surprised.  His name occasionally shows up in my list of viewers of my stories after I posted reels or photos that would interest him, in this case the time lapse of the ship coming into port.

I then got swept up once again in the activity of my family, the ship, a bottle of sparkling wine, dinner, and music. It wasn’t until we all went our separate ways in the evening, that I returned to that promenade deck, found a bench, and watched the sun set, as I paused once again.

A small recreational ship headed straight for us, pulled up along side us for a moment, and then turned around and went back the way it came. It was their curiosity of something bigger without ever interacting that reminded me once again of that view on my Instagram Story.

I don’t know exactly what I feel about it. For someone who said he had been feeling doubts for a long time and clearly had one foot out the door possibly for years, it feels a disconnect that almost a year later, he is still following me this closely.  I shouldn't be surprised by that though with how little the end made sense to me.

With that disconnect, there’s also this sense of reluctant acceptance that it is just what it is.   I doubt I will ever understand and I feel like as time passes it gets easier to release bit by bit that need for understanding.

There’s an absence of something but I don’t know exactly what - I don’t know that I miss him as a person. Maybe it’s just an absence of the partner I thought I had.

And with each breath in of salty air, there is a calmness that replaces a small piece of the sadness I breathe out.  The sea and Mother Nature are a huge source of healing for me.  It's that connection to something so immense and so incredibly beautiful that it puts everything else in perspective.