Perpetual Motion: Day 4

This is a six-part series about my time aboard CrimeWave at Sea 2025. If you want to join us on CrimeWave at Sea 2027, book your cabin now at crimewaveatsea.com/sinister or use SINISTER at checkout.

The PERFECT Thursday

Our show was at 9AM, so we met Brett at 8:30 in the stairwell near the theater. Inside, the stage was set. All tech was ready. All we had to do was plug in my laptop and say “Check check check” into the mics a few times. Setting up for a live show is not always that smooth. In fact, it’s almost never that smooth. For it to be completely seamless on a ship at 9am was transcendent. The show is always going to be better if we don’t have to fuck around with the details right before starting.

There was zero need for fuckery that morning. We plugged. We played. The crowd was delightful, even when I accidentally bonked our listener, Sam, on the head with a cassette tape I was trying to chuck into the audience.

Sam – I owe you a duck! Literally, I should have said “duck” when throwing. As an apology, I am mailing you Jim and Linda’s windowsill duck. Check your mailbox!

It would turn out that my new Aussie auntie, Margaret, accepted my invite to attend. Just before the show began, a staffer came to me and asked if I knew a Margaret. I said, “Yes, she is my grandma” but left off the part where I said, “as of 24-hours ago.” If he had been at all skeptical, I had 34 photos of us together that day (Thanks, Bima!) Plus she taught me about cruise ship pirate drills and caused Matt to say, “Pirates NEVER attack cruise ships,” which I joked about during the show. For that, I thought no harm in inviting her.

Like a goldfish, I had forgotten she was in the audience by the time the lights came up.

As planned, Christie and I asked who in the audience had traveled furthest. We didn’t add “to attend CrimeWave at Sea for Sinisterhood specifically.” That’s on me. Also, like I said, I forgot Margaret was in there.

So when a soft Aussie accent called out, “Australia!” from the back, I didn’t connect the two. It was only as she walked up the aisle, her face illuminated by the stage lights, that I recognized my Aussie auntie. I handed her a metal tumbler engraved with the logo of what I hoped would become her new favorite podcast and did the mental math of trying to explain all that onstage. We only had 55 minutes remaining and a whole lot of story to get through. Fuck it, save it for the essay, I thought.

A few weeks later back on land, I received the warmest, kindest follow up email from Margaret, confirming my hopes. She had begun listening and had such lovely comments about the show. Cheers to my Aussie auntie forever!

After our show, we headed down to meet with the other creators and celebrate the festival’s success. We hugged, reminisced, and signed posters for one another to take home before taking a group photo. Posters rolled into tubes, it was time to change into our swimsuits and disembark for RC’s proprietary island, Perfect Day at CocoCay. I’d seen the sign from our balcony earlier that morning, threatening me, literally, with a good time, its huge yellow letters screaming PERFECT at me. Without flaws: our perfect day.

Our beach bags packed, bathing suits on, feet in Crocs, we set out for perfection. At noon, the creators were hosting a pool party, where we could chill and swim with our listeners in the largest freshwater pool in the Caribbean, complete with a swim-up bar.

The largest freshwater pool in the Caribbean really lived up to the hype. With a Kraken Piña Colada for me and a Kraken Strawberry Daiquiri for Christie, we waded into the water with so many listeners, I can’t even tell you. No, I mean I actually cannot tell you. I promise it is only because I did not have my notebook with me. It certainly is not because of the visible Kraken rum floater on top of the already deliciously rummy white slush beneath it.

Things I do recall: We all craned our necks up trying to see an iguana the length of my forearm lounging in the greenery on the mini-island in the middle of the pool. A bee landed near me, and in my attempts to save it, I annihilated it instead. It was as if a person was drowning and rather than hand them the oar, I walloped the water around them until they were sputtering and flailing. Christie came over and with a gentle scoop of her hand rescued the poor creature and freed him on a plant nearby.

We met some lovely listeners in the pool, but I must confess, between not having my notebook and pen due to being in the water and the aforementioned Kraken floaters on my piña coladas, I have to say your names and faces are written on my heart but not in my spiral. After a lot of laughs and some RC-snapped pics, we hopped out of the water to get some lunch. Send me any pics you have of that afternoon because I know we took a few, but, alas, I do not have them.

Quick PSA, which I missed while aboard: you HAVE to get the photos before you dock back in the States. I did not know they all got erased the second the boat hit U.S. port. What happens in the sea, stays in the sea. Unless you opt for a photo package.

Like I said earlier, RC really likes to emphasize the hyperbolic: PERFECT Day, the HIGHEST vantage point, the LARGEST pool. The heavy emphasis on elite/best/most/-est is understandable. It’s a competitive industry. There are a lot of cruises one could take. The problem with me is I have a different definition of “perfect” – one that I think was satisfied during my time there.

Back home, I got a thick ass 1972 Webster’s Illustrated Dictionary for $2 — yes, TWO DOLLARS — outside a bookstore from a box of books. I use it to look up words I don’t know. I keep a list of new words when I am reading, then when I can’t sleep, I’ll “do definitions” until my eyes get heavy. You know, like your average red-blooded American.

Merriam-Webster Online’s first definition of perfect has a lot of sub-defs: “(a) being entirely without fault or defect; (b) satisfying all requirements; (c) corresponding to an ideal standard or an abstract concept; (d) faithfully reproducing the original.” Compare this to the definition in the 1972 dictionary, which starts off with, “complete in all respects.” The modern definition doesn’t address that until the third entry down, which is “pure/total, lacking in no essential detail.”

I feel like nowadays so much of a trip is designed to be “perfect” in the first-new definition way: being entirely without fault or defect. People only have precious little time off work and precious few resources to spend getting to a destination. Meanwhile, something can have defects or faults and still be perfect, if it is complete in all respects, lacking nothing.

Of course we all want perfection. But is the “perfect” we’re chasing the online definition or that dusty old 1972 version?

The former is illusory. Only the latter is achievable. And not only that, it’s guaranteed if you’re thoughtful about it.

Coco Cay has all the amenities of a giant water park with real beaches and real iguanas. Didn’t know about that before arriving but was very stoked to find tiny dinosaurs leaving long divets in the sand. My sister, Shannon, had an iguana as a pet when we were kids, with dreams of him one day growing to the size of the scaly monsters of Coco Cay. Sadly, it was not meant to be. Due to an unfortunate incident with the iguana, an aquarium, a large trampoline, and an adult supervisor who shall remain nameless, Iggy was buried beside the hamster, gerbil, and various cats we laid to rest out by the old back fence. That garbage collector in Mesquite, Texas has no idea a Stephen King novel lurks on the reverse of the chain link.

I sat on a lounge chair under a canopy of green with an iguana bigger than my nine-pound chihuahua back home weaving in and out of the beach chairs underneath us. We ate some lunch and got to talking with a pair of listeners. Hands full of tacos, again I did not have my notebook to write your names, but our iguana spotting and reptile/tattoo conversation stick with me forever. The real star of the show was the big boy Iguana. Dragging his fat tail behind him, I noticed the very end was a darker brown, regrown after a loss.

We swam more, catching up with folks we’d met earlier and meeting new friends for the first time. It was so thoughtful but unnecessary when folks would apologize for saying hi. Every time we’d remind them – we literally signed up for this! CrimeWave promised us we’d be going on vacation WITH y’all, not adjacent to you

I wore a huge straw hat I received as a bridal party gift a fear years ago. It’s has HEATHER written across the back in large black script font. Real incognito. I also wore my Margaritaville Crocs, to the complaint of my aging arches. Was it for the bit? Sure, but it was also in case anybody didn’t hear me talk and wondered from sight, “Is that Heather?” Check the feet. If you see a parrot-shaped bottle opener affixed to my foot, it’s me! I wanted anybody who wanted to say hi to be able to say hi. The Bahamas are far! If someone came all that way to see us, we wanted to be sure we were seen and we saw you back. It’s the whole point, ya know?

After our second round of swimming, the creator pool takeover wound down and the masses dispersed to our various on-island activities. Our foursome rode the tram all around the island. ALL around it. We even saw some behind-the-scenes areas, like spots where they’d intentionally planted big rows of bushes to hide the plumbing equipment.

We rode past the big balloon launch pad. The “Up Up and Away” is a tethered helium balloon that takes riders up to 450 feet in the air. As many as THIRTY people can pile into the light-weight aluminum frame. You can see nearby islands, other ships, and even wildlife like dolphins, sea turtles, and large rays. The water looks more translucent the higher you go.

I didn’t try it, but I bet if you cut the thing loose you could make it to Paradise Falls like Carl and Russell.

The island is also home to Daredevil’s Peak, a 135-foot waterslide, and would you believe, it is the TALLEST waterslide in North America. I did not go down it, not due to fear of heights but a combination stair-avoidance and fear of extreme wedgies.

Long before Coco Cay was home to several of the -est-iest attractions in the Caribbean, around the years 800 to 1500, local Lucayan people used Coco Cay – formerly known as Little Stirrup Cay – for fishing, conch harvesting, and travel routes. After Columbus sailed the ocean blue, the Spanish enslaved and killed the Lucayans. The inhabitants once numbered around 30,000. Over about ten years, all those folks were gone. A whole population wiped out in the span of a decade.

Over the next century, the island was used for salt extraction. You could take a rake and shovel in the shallow tidal flat after the sun evaporated the water and rake up salt rocks. Maybe some of that ended up on a plate or slab of meat or a spot of ice somewhere. This use continued until it came under British rule in 1629. Private owners took over from there. They eventually leased it to RC, which started docking nearby in the 1980s. They’d take people ashore in smaller boats to explore, until 2017 when RC invested $250 million to turn it into what it is today.

A quick aside on the name or else I’ll feel like I am taking crazy pills. It’s called “Perfect Day at Coco Cay.” In the Bahamas and South Florida, C-A-Y is pronounced “key” like what goes in a lock. I’d wager a majority aboard our ship were not Bahamains, nor were they Americans of the South Floridian kind. To an average ignorant new cruiser like myself, C-A-Y put in the same rhythmic, oft-repeated phrase as D-A-Y makes me want to pronounce them both as the same thing. It feels like a corporate practical joke to expect people to resist the urge to rhyme. We all love to rhyme. I did it mentally earlier when I typed “Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” I say it that way because of a rhyme in my head. It’s the same way I remember all the states in the union in alphabetical order.

For its part, RC officially says Coco KEY, but I’ll be goddamned if everyone I heard didn’t say Perfect Day at Coco KAY.

After a few trips around on the tram and some unexpected steps we got in while walking the back lot, we ended up back at the beach closest to the pool. I ran into Dan Cummins standing in the sand, which is a fabulous sentence on its own. He told me that, not far out into the shallow he’d seen a conch shell, and it had a creature inside of it!

Tempted to find it, I waded out in the water to my hips. A dozen white fish, so fancy you could find them in a rich man’s tank, surrounded me. I couldn’t touch them; they were too quick and translucent. I could only feel the whoosh of their collective movement.

Christie swam out further, floating on her back under the partly cloudy sky. Clouds blotting out the sun are curiously perfect if you look at them the right way. The right way is weightless on your back with a conch for company.

We walked back to the ship and collapsed in our respective state rooms for naps. After showering and getting ready for our Q&A meet-and-greet with listeners, I had a bit of time and decided to do my favorite activity: wandering. Cruise ships are great for wandering, and I love wandering because wandering leads to thoughts.

SHIP THOUGHTS

I will now reproduce for you in whole my tiny notebook notes from this point in the cruise and offer context on each. Much of what I write reflectively is kicked off by a note in my tiny notebook. I like Field Notes brand, but having filled the one I brought — a special edition National Parks Everglades one featuring a pelican on the cover– I turned to one of six mini- Moleskine notebooks I had packed. A pen and some sort of 3×5 notebook has to be on my person at all times or I get cagey and weird. I’ll start taking voice notes, talking into my watch like a Power Ranger contacting Zordon.

My small, brown Moleskine in hand, wandering the ship with nowhere to be for an hour, I wrote the following at the top of a new sheet:

THURS – 6:22 PM

Feelings I Had

The first: I wish I could explore more.

Oh did I then and do I now wish the same. LOTS was vast, and it’s not even the largest ship in the fleet or the world, for that matter. I was so obsessed with the Titanic as a kid. Like carved-a-scale-model-out-of-green-floral-foam obsessed. Both the movie and the disaster. Maybe that’s why big ass ships mesmerize me. I also didn’t know the word hubris back then.

Humans like to travel. If we didn’t, we’d all stay where we were born forever. The mind and body yearn for novelty, yet become distressed when untethered from Home – either specific (e.g., a house at a certain address) or symbolic (e.g, a hometown). We yearn to belong but abhor being caged. By we, I mean me, of course, but I feel backed by circumstantial evidence plus the writings and creations of like a bajillion travelers before me (see, e.g., W. Whitman, E. Hemmingway, D.F. Wallace, D. Sedaris, A. Bourdain, R. Steves, and a whole lot of other people who aren’t just white men, half of whom died by their own hand.)

Their writings and my own experience, for me, corroborate the universality of the grains of these feelings I am gripping in my hand, more falling out the tighter I squeeze.

My monkey brain is tickled by how big this ship is. How much work has gone into it. One of the reasons why I looked for the tour and wanted to wander even more was because I wanted to see the nuts and bolts of the place. That’s what is crazy about this floating city block. It wasn’t printed out whole at a factory. It’s like that one time I got to tour the Boeing factory in Seattle. They brought us through where they stick all the plane parts together, and you realize that you’re hurtling through space in air too thin to breathe in strapped to a seat that some guy named Darrell took a screwdriver to.

Similarly, someone somewhere riveted together this hull and floors and whole ass ELEVATOR SYSTEMS floating in the OCEAN. Not to sound like I just fell off the turnip truck, but holy shit, it was crazy. It was crazy the Titanic ever existed, or submarines. Buildings are nuts if you zoom out. In July, Paris and I drove across the longest continuous bridge in the world over Louisiana’s Lake Pontchartrain. Somebody dug pillars down in the muck and stretched concrete across miles of water and they did it before real fast computers.

Anything ever made started out as a pile of proverbial Lego bricks before someone got the instructions (or made them up) and started snapping shit together in a way that, absent and act of God or terror, won’t come crashing down and kill you.

So that’s why I wished I could explore the ship more – to see the nuts.

Next I wrote: Some platforms with lights are dusty.

This is an observation from the eleventh floor aft balcony, an area where you can stand and look down at the 5th floor Tomenade. The dust on the platform didn’t offend me. It made me think of the thousands of people who have passed through LOTS before me – passengers and staff – and how, even when the people flow in and out like ants, some fixtures remain, collecting your skin flecks and clothing lint and the molecules you breathe out, waiting for you to come back.

Along the balcony where I was, platforms the size of large shoeboxes supported the lights. Without those, there’d be no ambiance of the promenade shops or strobes for the Decades Dance party or light to see the morning stretching session. They light the cafe/bakery on one end and the pizza place on the other, where the Coca-Cola Freestyle machines live. Both places were called Sortino’s, which was confusing to me, so I stopped looking at the signs and just went by smell.

I shifted my gaze from the lights to the folks on the Promenade below. Looking down, I wagered most people were not contemplating the light fixtures and wrote:

Everyone is having fun down on the Promenade below.

I think the ship theme night may have been cowboy/girl or western wear? Either that or else a passel of my Texan brethren had boarded and were sporting their yeehawiest of cowboy hats. They were hooting and hollering, as cowpoke do. People in khaki shorts and polos were enjoying a pianist playing at a bar. Families in resort wear were grabbing treats from the cafes and scuttling to their various destinations. Everyone I could see seemed swept up in the cruiseiness of it all: loud music, flashing lights, drinks in hand, plans for the night laid out perfectly.

Observing this, I wrote, DO NOT THROW A SODA ON THEM!

I looked at the Diet Cherry Dr Pepper in the RFID-chipped cup in my hand and felt its heft. Why did I envision it falling, slow-mo, the RC logo looking back at me like Hans Gruber as the plastic of it clattered to the tile six stories below me? The brown liquid spraying on that couple’s light-washed jeans. The RFID-chip, miraculously, being knocked loose. The women nearby in tropical caftans screaming, ducking from the threat.

Beneath that note to self, I added: Those cowboys/girls and families in matching floral dresses don’t deserve that.

Below that: + consequences.

What consequences? The mind reels. Even if I could successfully argue it was an accident (I’d have to burn my notebook), I’d still be known as the klutz who beaned a retired rodeo star or whoever with a cold cup of Coke.

Past the edges of the walkway on Deck Five, you can see all the way down to Deck Three, which gives a trippy perspective from as far up as I was.

As I looked down past the landing on five, down further to the floor on three, I wrote:

imagined it filling with water.

Thanks, James Cameron. Because of you, I have a vivid starting point to imagine what a ship sinking might look like. It seeps in from the seams at first, bursting under the molding then covering the tile. It bubbles the faster it goes, causing the canvases of “fine art” on easels for sale outside the karaoke area to bobble and pitch as the water rises.

It creeps up the stairs, at first apprehensive as it soaks into the carpet, but when it’s clear of the landing, there are no more mitigating measures to stop it. It rushes assuredly to the fourth deck elevator landing. Pianos are submerged. Cocktail glasses float by. The mixed nuts from the bowl in the bar are washed out; the bowl sunk. The water would get so high, I could jump off this balcony and swim.

What other choice would I have? Run from here up to the pool deck? Run up those outside stairs to twelve, the highest deck you can stand outside on? Or do I run up the stairs inside, getting to the highest point: the windowless prayer chapel on fifteen? Trapped there, hands clasped, large wooden cross submerging before my eyes, I would gulp in the ocean as a pair of glowing headphones bobbed by, discarded by the drowned victims of the silent disco down on fourteen, their screams never heard. From there, I would ride LOTS down to the sea floor below like Jack Dawson and all the other poor bastards whose two-person-capacity wood scraps were occupied by a single soul taking her half out of the middle.

You guys did a NUMBER on us with that flick.

But that was Titanic.

Not the LOTS. Not tonight. Rivets firmly rived in place, we sailed on, unsunk.

My next thought:

I GET it, okay? I get it. All at once wanting to do everything and wanting to bounce.

The human-ish need to join the metaphorical conga line is strong. The pull is mighty.

I walked out to the Solarium bar outside and wrote, A lady in a neon orange bikini lying face down in the dark. How long could a dead person stay on the chair?

A man walked over and told her everyone was headed to dinner in an hour. She pulled up her chin, replied something I couldn’t hear, and lied her head back down.

Walking back indoors, I wrote, Overwhelmed by colors. Toucan tile mosaic. At the end of the eleventh floor deck there is a large mosaic with a toucan. Again, this is not 3D printed somewhere. Somebody smashed up tiles and glued them together to form a disjointed but cohesive tropical scene for people to pass again and again, rarely noticing.

Inside, near the entry to the restaurants, I watched the bustle of couples and groups and families splinter off along various routes. I wrote: I can see how people become cruisers.

You’re together. Even if there are a million things you could do, you’re together. Maybe Mary is passed out in her orange bikini while everyone is 200 feet away eating mashed potatoes and brownies, but dammit, we’re together.

Then I wrote: I wish I could’ve gone on a cruise w/ my dad.

DFW wrote his cruise essay in 1995. That’s right about the time when I would’ve gone on a cruise with my family. My parents had done their own cruise in the late ’70s B.C., as they would say, before children. But the early-to-mid-90s were prime vacation time for the McKinney family. We got to go to Disney World, Las Vegas, and an all-inclusive resort in Ixtapa, Mexico. If one of those had been a cruise instead, I could’ve been skeet shooting with my Phil or, also likely at some point, awaiting his exit from the casino.

I wrote next: There are hotel lobby-like spots everywhere, seating which I love b/c no one is upset that I exist there. I’m just able to stop here at these random chairs by the photo place and write.

I loved how many third-spaces there were for me to pop into and write. I could walk and stop and write and everyone was cool with it. It was like one big hotel lobby (compliment).

So there I sat. Perhaps subconsciously contemplating the cruise I never got with my dad, I wrote:

I WANT TO PUT 20S IN ALL THE SLOT MACHINES. But alas I cannot.

Rather than shred more money in the slot machine, I found a lower stakes way to satisfy my dopamine urge: the kids’ arcade on Deck Twelve. There I stared into the claw machines, sizing up the impossibilities. I swiped my SeaPass to try to win a Donkey Kong at the first machine. No dice. But I did manage to win a little red duck from the machine full of rubber ducks.

At 7PM they dim all the lights. I love.

Bands playing all over. Their notes overlap in small areas that feel like sonic fabric stitched together in a quilt.

They change the carpets. This was in reference to the elevators’ rectangles with the day of the week printed on them. Gotta be careful around fifteen minutes to midnight when they start changing them early.

I headed back to the Schooner where I’d been writing the day before. I sat down with Wayan, the same bartender who’d helped me the day before.

“Did you finish writing, ma’am?”

“I’m never finished,” I told him.

You can be cool and say cryptic things like this on a cruise ship. He made my new favorite drink – Desert Pear Margarita. As I sipped, I thought of his remaining week, finishing out the past SEVEN MONTHS aboard ships. When I signed for the drink, I slipped in a $20 bill, rescued from the clutches of the slot machine.

“Better than casino,” I wrote to myself.

With a different kind of dopamine hit, I wanted more. Steering clear of the casino adjacent to the Schooner, I headed for the photo area in search of Bima. The manager told me Bima wasn’t there, but around the corner, I saw him shooting pics of couples on their way into Michaelangelo’s, the steakhouse.

“So I am standing here waiting for him to finish a shoot,” I wrote.

Earlier, Bima had delivered over two dozen 8×10 glossies of Margaret, Micah, and me to my room, complete with a folio that folded out into a pop-up model of the LOTS itself. I took the other $20 saved from the Huff ’n Puff and Casper machines and approached Bima. I thanked him for the pics and gave him the tip over his many objections. He bowed multiple times and thanked me. We hugged. We took a selfie on my Instax, and I printed it for him.

“He’s an angel,” I wrote.

If RC ever does anything bad to Wayan or Bima or Javan, I will pulverize every ship in the whole fleet myself, by hand, on god.

Being as it was the seven o’clock hour, people flitted around to their reservations. I wrote – 

“Some people look like children w/drinks.”

And they did! All dressed up for a cousin’s wedding or something, finally free to swill the piña colada they swiped from grandma’s table.

I stopped at a ship info station (like a cocktail table with a ship map on it) and wrote, “These writing stations are great! Oh wait.” Definitely not a writing station. Multifunctional flat surfaces, I guess we can call them.

From around the corner, I was delighted when a listener named Sarah greeted me. We got to talking about the ship and her trip so far. Before long, it was time for our meet and greet Q&A session. A group of our listeners who booked earliest joined us for a meet and greet where we answered questions, discussed the trip, and I shared my ship tour experience. We all had one big conversation thanks to the awesome questions like, “Does that mean they have a big pile of bones down there?” with regards to the Pulverizer.

FINAL BOW

After the Q&A, Christie and I met Tommy and Paris at the Schooner. We spotted our listeners Kylie and Chris and all got to chatting. Kylie told me someone saw me writing in my notebook after she and her husband walked off in the casino. She was curious what I wrote.

“Your name and where we met,” I said. “I always try to write down the things I want to remember.”

My memory is not bad, but with my tiny notebook, it becomes unimpeachable. However, if I can’t write it down, goldfish mind takes over. You saw it yourself earlier! I forgot my own auntie was in the audience.

Standing there, we talked work and hobbies and working out. I had my notebook in my hand again as we were discussing weightlifting. I told Kylie I thought I wasn’t cut out for it, like I couldn’t even start to try.

The next thing I wrote beside her name was the kind encouragement she offered in the face of my own discouragement: “Anybody can do anything.” Just in case you were wondering what I was scribbling. It was something I wanted to remember.

It was soon time for Christie and me to descend into the backstage area and gather with the other creators, ready to start the closing ceremonies and the game show. For the final time, all the creators were together waiting to take the stage of the arena. The audience burst with conversation we could hear through the curtain. It ramped us up as the IRL crew divided us into two teams. Team 1 was Side Stories, True Crime Campfire, and the Housewives of True Crime. Meanwhile, Christie and I joined Team 2 with Scared to Death, A Paranormal Chicks, and Richard of Unexplained.

We ran out to booming intro music. Our intrepid emcee, Robert, had traded his red sequin tuxedo jacket for a police officer uniform, underestimating the audience’s willingness to take a bit to the extreme. The audience turned absolutely feral with (faux?) hostility, screaming and booing Robert as he playfully returned the fire. It was an ever-heightening joke that teetered on mutiny. The same arena doubles as the ice-skating rink, so any curious cruisers who wandered by were probably confused why RC hosted what sounded like full contact professional wrestling on ice.

For the first game, players had to run away from Halloween’s “Michael Myers,” played by IRL CEO Brett. The iconically eerie mask atop his towering muscular build provided ample motivation to run. Avoiding his clutches, we had to unlock a box with a series of keys.

I should’ve worn full-on workout gear, but instead I wore a t-shirt bathing suit cover up, printed with an hourglass, big breasted body in a string bikini, aligned just so it matched up with my neck. When I was sprinting for my life to avoid Michael Myers’ clutches, one of my teammates said, slightly in shock, “You’re athletic.” Either that, or I just have a really powerful imagination. I didn’t want to get got!

Our team won some rounds and lost some, too. Mostly it was fun to high five each other and scream along with the crowd. Christie repped Team 2 valiantly in the donut eating contest. It turned into another heightening bit that slung donuts crumbling to the floor. So wrapped up in action, we ended up grinding the treats that didn’t make it into the contestants’ mouths into a fine cinnamon-sugar powder under our feet.

The last game was a relay race. Before their turn, each player had to flip half-empty water bottles onto the table’s edge before running across the stage to complete a series of increasingly intricate tasks that culminated in packing a suitcase. The bottle flip proved troublesome for Team 2. This allowed Team 1 to get their final task completed so quickly that Ed Larson strutted his final stretch, completed suitcase rolling slowly beside him.

After a final bow and wave to the crowd, we headed back behind the curtain. Exhausted from laughing and truly exerting myself during the game show, I gathered my SeaPass and phone from backstage along with the rest of the gang. At the glow party, I bid adieu to everyone I could. I managed to take some pics and give some hugs – staying as long as I did not because I’m a rave baby, but because I didn’t want the whole thing to end.

The final night, all my clothes and items packed away, Paris asleep in bed, I headed out to the balcony.

Before I tell you this next part, let’s review the official RC policy, which states, “Guests must be appropriately attired including while on stateroom balconies if visible to others onboard, on other vessels or ashore.”

It was after 1am, and we were at sea.  I was in the clear. Nobody was outside on either side of us. You can see beneath the partitions between the balconies. No feet. No lights. I was completely alone. Only the Moon, the waves, and me.

Given that we were still under the bright illumination of November’s Beaver Moon, I decided to moon bathe. Nude. It just felt like something I needed to do. After all the beautiful views I’d seen that week, the least I could do was return the favor.

I looked up at the moon, a big white spot bursting against a sky too illuminated to be black. The moon spilled out on all sides of herself. She scared off clouds and let the train of her reflection drag across the water toward me.

Thank you, Moon, I said. Thank you, Ocean.

There is something real and particulate about it – touching the moon, literally, through a string of particles like bulbs on a strand of Christmas lights. The light touching me touched the light beside that and beside that all the way back to the Moon and back to the Sun it was reflecting. One big net, stretching and enclosing us all, on land and on sea.

I got in bed and shut my eyes for just a blink before the disembarkation announcements began.

***

Stay tuned for Day 5

Learn more and join us at CrimeWave 2.0

If you liked what you read, share this work with a friend and/or fuel my next writing piece by Venmo’ing me a cup of coffee (@heathervstheworld) or via the handy form below. Thanks for reading!