A few days ago, I called my husband to pick me up from work. This was weird for two reasons. First, I had ridden my bike to work. Second, I felt fine and could totally have ridden home. So…why the ride? It’s because I had a huge mug of tea, and I couldn’t just chug it down before leaving. I also couldn’t bring myself to pour it down the sink, because this is the last of the tea we got at the spice souk in Dubai. I’m not going to find more of it here.

When I took a shower at the gym and removed the last of the stuck-on garbage left from our crossing the equator ceremony, I gave a little sigh. When I threw away the last wrapper from the last foreign snacks we’d bought, I stared into the bin for a while. With each loss, our time at sea gets further and further away. When I finished the last of the tea I’d bought in Singapore from a shop that would happily ship me more, I had to stop myself from ordering an entire case to replace it. But the tea from Dubai, an unexpectedly delightful cup, I can’t replace. I didn’t want to waste a single drop, so I made my husband pick me and my bicycle up so I could savor what’s left of it.

As of today, we haven’t been home for as long as we were at sea, but it still seems like a lifetime ago. I still haven’t finished the scrapbook, and some of our souvenirs have been repurposed. But there are so many things I’m losing…

What did I eat for lunch in the cafe in the visitor’s center at Stonehenge? I remember it had just started to rain, and we weren’t due back on the bus for half an hour, and that I had something I really liked, but what was it?

What was the name of the woman who sat by me at lunch in Muscat? I remember that she and her husband had booked a world cruise just before COVID, but it was cancelled. And then a year ago, her husband died, and she decided to go on a cruise by herself.

I remember that I took an improv class, but other than the fact that a guy named Roger and I won the “who is the best-loved person on the ship” game (it’s like musical chairs, except you have to cluster in groups when the music stops, and anyone not in a group is out, presumably because they are not sufficiently loved), but I don’t remember anything else we did in that class.

There was a lecturer who was just terrible. So much so that I remember that his slide show included photos of his primary school and some vintage cars, but I don’t remember the actual subject of his lecture. I just remember that it had nothing to do with his primary school or vintage cars.

Am I letting these things go because they’re less important than the feel of the heat in Singapore? Or the sight of chickens living deep in a cave in Malaysia? Or how it felt to ride in one of the ship’s lifeboats on rough sea? I can’t say. But what I can say is that I had so many experiences that even if I forgot most of them, there would still be enough to think back on for the rest of my life.