Still We Sail (To Light)

*We do not arrive. We continue. And continuing, together, is enough.*

The gathering happened in December, at the grandmother's house, which was the house it had always happened in — the same kitchen, the same table extended with the leaf that lived under the stairs, the same window that looked onto the garden that was brown and bare in winter but which all of them had seen green. There were more people than there used to be. Some were new additions. Some seats were empty for the first time. Both things were true and neither cancelled the other.

Noa was seventeen now. She had been eleven at the harbour. She thought about the harbour sometimes — about her grandfather naming the water, about the people who had crossed it, about the ones who were lost. Her grandfather was at the table. He was slower this year, smaller in the way of someone who is giving things back gradually, but his eyes were the same and he remembered everything. He had written down the names. She had her copy.

There had been loss that year. There had been change. The cousin who had moved away was back, temporarily, with a child of his own that nobody had quite gotten used to yet. The great-aunt who sat at the end of the table had been ill and recovered and was thinner. The family had the slightly rearranged look of a group that has been tested and has continued, which is not the same as being unchanged.

After dinner Noa sat beside her grandfather and he asked her how she was. She said she didn't know — which was the truest answer and the one she could not have given a few years ago, when not knowing felt like failure. He said that was fine. He said not knowing was an honest place to be. He said: "You're still here." She said: "We're all still here." He looked around the table — the old and the new, the present and the absent in the chairs of the present — and he said: "Yes. Still we sail."

She had heard this phrase all her life, the family saying, her grandmother's phrase originally, meaning: we keep going, not because the sea is calm, not because we know the destination, but because the alternative is to stop, and we do not stop. She understood it differently now. It was not a declaration of strength. It was a description of what love looks like from the outside: people who keep showing up for each other in ordinary rooms, who remember the names, who make space at the table, who are still here when December comes around again.

She helped clear the table. She washed up with her mother. She drove home through the dark with the window slightly open, the cold air coming in, the lights of other people's houses passing one by one. She was not at the destination. There was no destination. There was only this — still sailing, still together, still enough.

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*We do not arrive. We keep going, together, and that is the whole of what it means to love someone through time.*