'My Pronouns Are Up/Yours'

And other fun things from the sea.

I’m alone on a cruise ship.

And I love being alone on cruise ships.

“Should we maybe go to the—”

“—no,” I want to reply to any person who has ever traveled with me. “WE are not going to anything.”

I won’t be compromising or asking about your day or feigning interest in seeing Royal Caribbean’s Musical Adventures of 007: Licensed to Thrill.

Just me, my breakfast, and the pleasure of watching a very large man walk by in front of me, holding a tray while he wears a tank top that reads ‘My Pronouns Are Up/Yours.’

I smile.

Across the deck: a child drowns his pancakes in syrup. His mother yells at him, but he continues to pour. The husband ignores this — he’s busy staring at a hot teenage girl who he probably saw last night at the Mojito Lounge.

She was with her friends, he thinks to himself, but maybe if I had gone up to her and asked if — “Michael!” his wife says, prodding him with her needle-y fingers. “Take the syrup away!”

A warm breeze blows across my face, plucking me out of voyeurism as if to remind me how grateful I am to not be Michael.

To my right, a round brown woman with bright red lipstick scrubs ketchup off the table.

Her name is Sumi, and she’s from Mauritius, at least, according to the nametag on her chest that bounces with every scrub. There’s a lot of ketchup on the table, but Sumi doesn’t seem to mind. She looks content, like the way one would if they had pushed enough boulders to realize that they all end up feeling the same.

It’s time to eat, and so I look down at my plate.

*Three plates.

That’s one of the best parts of cruises: the food is everywhere, all the time, and free. I can order an omelette and two waffles and four yogurt parfaits, and then I can decide that I’m actually good with just coffee, and though I’ve never done this, the fact that I can is what makes cruises so special.

Cruisism — an abundance economy of waste and gluttony. Hedonism and selfishness and gambling and swingers and HIIT classes and trivia and cruisejail and pizza and passengers with abs and passengers who have never seen their abs and people from third world countries scrubbing ketchup next to people who hate people from third world countries and it is the most beautiful clash of human experiences and I don’t know why anyone would opt to vacation any other way.

Plate 1: highlighter-yellow scrambled eggs, like the ones you’d find at a Holiday Inn Express continental breakfast, next to a cup of fruit and a few breakfast potatoes.

I rate the food on Royal Caribbean a 5/10, Norwegian a 6, and Virgin a 7, but it mostly all tastes relatively the same, which makes sense, since there is an oligopoly of three to four major food suppliers that dominate the logistics of almost all major cruise ports — but I’m fine with that, because the most important thing to me about the food on cruises is not how it tastes, but rather how I don’t feel like I’m paying to consume.

I pick up my fork.

But then.

I realize I’ve forgotten coffee.

And as I stand to get some, a seagull on a faraway rail looks my way.

We lock eyes, and then he breaks from my stare to look down at the potatoes on my plate, reminding me of one of the vulnerabilities of traveling without a boyfriend/cousin/food-guard.

Sumi sees all of this, “I’ll watch him,” she says, continuing to scrub, “You go.”

I nod and comply.

Sumi seems nice, and this is probably due to many factors, one of which being that she really likes her job.

“You do?”

“Yes,” she says, with sweat beading on her forehead as she polishes a new table, “I get to travel to beautiful places and talk to people. And be outside,” she motions to our surroundings with her dirty rag. “I love being outside.”

I think about where she’s from and what Mauritius must be like, and I realize I know nothing about it.

It must not be good.

Maybe they don’t have outside.

I don’t even know where it is, honestly.

It sounds like a place you’ve heard of, but when you try to think more about it, you just can’t.

Like Wellington.

She looks Indian.

“Mauritius is in Asia, right?”

“Africa.”

“Oh. Yeah,” I reply.

A familiar voice catches my attention — “Yes, thank you,” it says to the buffet attendant who has handed the speaker a latte in a to-go cup. The speaker’s name is Jules Mahr, and she stands next to her 6-foot friend named Melanie. The two of them are from St. Louis. We met last night at karaoke after they hopped on stage to sing Pour Some Sugar On Me. They crushed. Melanie whipped her hair in the air for a full thirty-second guitar solo, only to be upstaged by Short Ginger Jules, who is probably fifty pounds heavier than anyone you’d expect to be able to do the splits, who did the splits.

She notices me.

“Alexxxxxx,” Jules says as she and Melanie walk over.

Melanie puts her hand on my shoulder. Last night, we hung out for hours, bopping around to three different bars, so this hand placement doesn’t feel weird. When you’re floating in the ocean for four or five days with the same group of passengers, and none of you have strong enough cell service to yank you out of the present, you end up seeing the same faces over and over again, at trivia or Teppanyaki or ice skating, and your brain starts to familiarize itself with them. You think, “Oh! That’s Angie, the 93-year-old Black woman whose birthday it was at the comedy show,” or “That’s the group of hot hipster men who I now realize are all lesbians.”

Sumi walks up to collect my second plate of half-eaten food, mostly fruit rinds and an untouched chicken sausage.

I introduce her to the girls.

“Hi Sumi,” they say, and then Sumi asks us if we’re ready for the White Night tonight, telling us that it’s going to be a very fun party and that we’re going to love it because everyone on the ship will be wearing white and it is very cool to see.

I nod along, though I don’t agree.

I’ve done this dance many times, where the day consists of me being told how exciting an upcoming evening will be where everyone wears the same color, and though I don’t really understand why this is interesting, or special, I allow myself to go along with the hysteria, getting my hopes up about a ‘Scarlet Night’, or a ‘Formal Night’, or a ‘White Party’, just to end up disappointed. Like every and all New Year’s.

I think of asking Sumi more questions to see if this White Night will be different, but then I realize that, as a breakfast attendant, Sumi’s galley-level-worker caste is contractually barred from attending the White Party, so, even though she’s on her fifth nine-month contract, and every third or fourth day of her life has been spent promoting a party (so, 263 White Parties so far), it’s a party to which she’s never been.

“That party sounds very fun,” Jules says.

Melanie agrees.

The captain’s voice comes over the intercom. His accent is South African, which means that he can pass for British, but that he costs the cruise company 65% less than what they’d have to pay for a British person to do the same job.

“Good morning everyone,” he begins in a gruff tone that still retains its bouncy South Africanisms, “this is your captain here,” and as the girls listen in, I think about how the minimum wage in South Africa sits at $268 per month.

He says that we’ve docked and that people who want to leave the ship to head over to Coco Cay, Royal Caribbean’s 250-million-dollar renovated fake island, can do so.

To be fair to Royal Caribbean, it’s a nice fake island.

It has the feeling as if there once were spiders and snakes and lizards and iguanas but then a planning committee lifted up the whole island and dumped it through a sifter, filtering out anything that could remind vacationers of nature or discomfort or Bahamanians, and then they took the pure white sand and, on top of it, poked into place a few palm trees, zip lines, cabanas, a buffalo wings station and cute little air-conditioned stores with Royal-Caribbean-branded beer koozies.

The family across the deck, the one with the kid who pours too much syrup and the woman who doesn’t like her husband, starts to collect their things. The husband hands the sunscreen to his son.

Jules and Melanie head out.

“You’re not going with your friends?” Sumi asks me.

I laugh and then tell her that I’d rather relax on the boat, that I don’t really like beaches, and am more of a forests kind of person, and then she tells me that I’d love Mauritius because they have incredible forests, and now I’m absolutely confused because as far as I know, Africa is big hot sand place with elephants, but, maybe there’s one forest hidden off to the side, and perhaps Sumi is from that forest.

She asks if she can take my plate, and I say yes, and then to my right, but far away, the man in the Up/Yours tank top seems to be having trouble with the milk dispenser.

He tries it two — three times, pressing the cup into the catch.

But nothing.

He looks around, spots Sumi, and then lifts his hand ever so slightly to hail. She heeds the call.

“See you tomorrow, sir,” she says to me as she scurries away.

“Bye Sumi!”

My phone buzzes because now that we’re at a port, phones work.

Jules and Melanie ask me to grab drinks tonight before trivia, which sounds fun, and, underneath that, I see a text from my boyfriend, inviting me to someone named Lindsay’s wedding on May 18th:

Lindsay, from work. Just sent you the email.

I pick up my coffee and bring my attention back to the deck.

To the seagull across the way.

And to the mother who is now yelling at her syrup son, “Noah!” for globbing sunscreen all over his face and now refusing to rub it in.

I glance down at my phone, open the Royal Caribbean app, and begin picking dates for my next cruise.

The father squeezes sunscreen into his palm and smears it across his own face, leaving it unrubbed, just like his son, the two of them mocking the mom.

On the app, I select May 18th.

And then the father dabs a glob onto his wife’s cheek. And it’s kind of cute.

And the son laughs.

And then, even the mom smiles.

Hi. Hello. Okay.

If you liked this piece you’ll probably also like this one: Meanwhile In Rural Vietnam.

As always, here are questions I’d like you, the reader, to answer.

Please answer as a comment, if you can :D

1. Have you ever been on a cruise? I feel like people hate cruises, but I don’t get it. I love them.

2. Before reading this, would you have been able to point to Mauritius on a map?

3. Do you ever solo travel? I feel like everyone should. It’s good for you.