Here is the Keelhauler sitting at the table in our Sea Room. I think that, when I took the photo, he was researching his retirement account on the computer. I made the curtains that hang behind him from a bolt of fabric I found at a thrift store. It’s a Cowtan and Tout hand-print, and I think I paid $10 for the whole thing. Not a bad deal. The curtains now hang in the dining room of the apartment I took when I moved downtown. A little alteration was necessary, but that’s true of almost every aspect of my life since I left the boat.

I could tell a story about every single element of this picture, but it would not serve a purpose outside of wallowing in nostalgia. The Keelhauler’s moved away, and the Sea Room has been dismantled. It is time for me to move on.

The Sea Room is now closed. Thank you for visiting.

Yesterday, I woke up to a light rain, which fueled my ambition to stay in my pajamas, under the blankets, and read long-neglected books.

Luckily, Cory woke up with the ambition to clean my apartment, and so that is what we did. Mainly him. He set to work doing dishes, washing floors, polishing mirrors. I organized papers and created a box for the Goodwill. Then, satisfied with the results of our efforts, we went to dinner over at the harbor.

While I was eating my spaghetti, a friend I’d known from living on the docks walked by. He’s the brother of a young, beautiful movie actress, and it’s always strange to see her features superimposed on a middle-aged rough-and-tumble sailor. We had a conversation through the glass. He asked me how I was with a facial expression that let me infer he was talking about the break-up. I was doing fine, I said. He made a roller-coaster motion with one hand, to indicate the up-and-down nature of life’s journey. I nodded agreement, smiled, and he moved on.

Cory and I went back to my place and opened a couple of beers. I have a giant stack of movies lent to me during my illness by thoughtful coworkers, and being low on funds, we decided to stay in and watch movies in my bed. It was very therapeutic, especially Dirty Dancing, which I’d somehow never seen. The Keelhauler was always perturbed at the number of movies I’d missed, growing up, and he and I would have catch-up marathons where we’d watch Red Dawn, Highlander, Smoky and the Bandit. We tried to rent Dirty Dancing several times, but it was always out. Recently, my dear friend Chelle sent me a copy, so that void in my life has been filled, and I now have context for the phrase, “I carried a watermelon.” At last! My pop culture knowledge is complete.

Today is a sunny day, full of promise, and although I woke up in the throes of a full-blown anxiety attack, with the addition of a vodka screwdriver and some leftover Valentine’s chocolates, things are looking up. Cory and I went to the video store, got a bunch of movies, and are going to hang out here, in my newly clean apartment, and waste this beautiful day.

I’ve been thinking a lot today about the drive the Keelhauler and I took to Wisconsin in December of 2009. For some reason, it’s on my mind today. The long stretches of plains, the snowy ride through the Colorado mountains, the swim in the natural hot springs, the nights spent huddled together in freezing hotel rooms, the absurd little exchanges that develop as a form of shorthand in a long relationship. I loved him then, wanted to marry him and get on with the business of our lives.

The Keelhauler’s girlfriend likes to spew that she and he have something that I “will never, ever be a part of, ever,” as I believe she expressed it, albeit without any punctuation. And it’s true. I won’t. I suppose her taunting is supposed to spur me to insane jealousy, or something. But he and I have a million of those moments that she will never be a part of. It’s not a competition, it’s just life. And I’m happy to be moving on with mine; without his chaos, his duplicity, without her illiterate, insecure rants.

True, his oft-expressed concern for my welfare rings hollow. It’s the equivalent of stomping on my chest while wearing ice skates, then calling over his shoulder, “I really want you to be ok,” as he heads off into his future. He abandoned me when I had cancer–accused me of faking it in order to get attention, even–and then disappeared. I don’t know if he will look into his rear-view mirror as he drives away, but I will not be there to notice.

When I opened my eyes, I was in a hospital room, surrounded by people. My throat burned, and I couldn’t speak. The Keelhauler came to my side, his face pale and lined, his eyes red saucers. Outside, the sun was just rising, the sky deep blue, the stars beginning to fade. It was about 5:30 in the morning, a little more than twenty-four hours after I’d lost consciousness.

My aunt, seated in a chair at the end of the bed, smiled and asked if I knew who she was. I did, but I had trouble piecing together the details of what had happened. All I knew for sure is that my last-ditch effort had failed. This left a lot of questions, not just about the last 24 hours, but about the future.

I don’t remember how I felt, apart from the pain in my throat. I was thrown by the Keelhauler’s fragile state. He, in turn, seemed thrown by mine.

“We just sat here all night, watching your blood pressure drop and drop,” he told me. Apparently, the adrenaline shots I’d received hadn’t worked, and he was stuck there at the end of my bed, watching the numbers tick by, each more disheartening than the last. “You wouldn’t wake up, and you wouldn’t wake up,” he said, his face a mask of pain. I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t sure what had happened. He loved me, he said. He was sorry, he said, over and over, tears running down his face. I watched this all happen without a clue as to how I should feel.

Gradually, I learned that a few hours after he’d left me, the Keelhauler had thought the better of leaving me alone, and returned to the boat. He found me in our bed, bloody and incoherent, pupils tiny pinpricks, spewing vitriol about how much I hated him. He got me dressed.

He called a friend, who came right over, and together, they pulled me out of the boat and strong-armed me down the dock and into the car. The Keelhauler says they tried to keep me talking on the way to the hospital, but that I was incoherent, and unconscious by the time we pulled up to the emergency room.

It felt strange to know that my body had experienced these things while my mind had not. I noted with irony that, on the white board on the wall, my attending doctor was listed as a Dr Kory.

The Keelhauler had called my family, my ex-husband, our friends to let them know what was happening, and then sat wide-eyed vigil, refusing to leave even to get a meal, for a full day and night. I could not comfort him. He was rattled. He went to the Sea Room–our shared studio and on-land living room–and retrieved the collar my favorite cat had worn. It bore a medal of St Christopher. He brought me A Confederacy of Dunces and Eloise in Paris, and a banana. He was so stressed, he was vibrating like a wire, checking on me constantly, calling me when he was absent. He needed care, and I couldn’t give it to him. He knelt by the bed and promised that he would never again ignore my calls. That promise was to prove short-lived.

I looked at his disheveled hair, his bloodshot eyes, and thought of how much I loved him, and how wrong everything had gone. Didn’t he know that I’d had an affair only because I thought he didn’t care about me? That I would have given up Cory in a heartbeat if the Keelhauler had been committed to me? There was no way for me to process everything happening. There was a nurse assigned to watch me every minute, and other nurses coming in to take vitals, to bring meals, to check my heart monitor. There were visitors with flowers, and doctors with clipboards and stern expressions. My wrists and forearms were covered in long, criss-crossing slashes. In the middle of all this was the Keelhauler, unsure what to do, and trying to help, afraid to leave. His mother had died in a hospital when he was a teenager, and I felt acute remorse at putting him through this ordeal.

Finally, he went home to sleep, and then went back to work a few days early. He called several times an hour, panicked. He didn’t know what was going to happen to me in his absence. There was talk of me going into rehab or detox, places I wouldn’t have access to my phone. “It feels like you’re going to the far side of the moon!” he would say, and my heart would ache. I sent him a song by A. C. Newman, called All of My Days and All of My Days Off, as a pledge of my love, a promise that my time was his. I listened to it over and over on my iPod. I didn’t sleep for three days, stayed up with the night nurses in a state of sub-hysteria, laughing at television commercials, talking girl talk literally all night long.

The decisions I had made had added up to a mess I would need time to clean up. Not enough time has passed, and in my desire to go forward with my life, I’ve not dealt with many aspects of what happened that night in November of 2009. In an incredible rebound, and his quest to find someone who won’t leave him, the Keelhauler has entangled himself with someone so obsessed with him that she has essentially taken over his life in order, she believes, to ensure his loyalty. Seeing his insistence on being in that relationship gives me a clue as to how deeply my infidelity and suicide attempt affected him. That knowledge makes me sad.

I stayed in the hospital for a week, and then, after throwing a fit when they threatened to discharge me, went straight to detox. That would prove to be some good, good times.

This part is harder to write than the previous.

Cory and I started seeing each other. Every day, I’d decide to break it off, but every day, I’d get a happy little text from him, wanting to see me, and I’d cave. I was infatuated with him.

At the same time, matters were complicated by the fact that the Keelhauler had suddenly rediscovered his interest in me. I didn’t know what to do. No: I did know what to do, but I didn’t do it. Im not sure how to explain why I kept seeing Cory, except that the months of neglect by the Keelhauler had convinced me on some level that, should he find out, he wouldn’t care.

Cory and I saw each other for about six weeks. Then, one day, I broke it off. I’d like to say I ended it out of some sense of decency, but really, I sensed that he’d turned his attentions to someone else, and I was jealous. I broke up with him in my car, and drove home, where the Keelhauler was waiting for me. Somehow, he’d discovered my infidelity, and was coldly furious–a reaction I found understandable but a bit hypocritical, given his own straying.

He was cold and laughed at me when I told him the affair was over. “We’re through,” he said, shutting his laptop and heading for the door. He listed off the things I was to do: essentially, move out immediately and go fuck myself. And then he left.

I was stunned and distraught. I wanted to call him, but couldn’t find my phone. I went out to the parking lot, but my car was missing. I went back to the boat and suddenly developed a kind of tunnel vision, where I couldn’t see my way clear of the situation. It was late. I perceived that I was losing everything I had. I couldn’t think of how to get help, or what, if summoned, help might do for me. I lost all perspective in a very few seconds.

At the same time, a sense of calm came over me, and my next steps seemed obvious. I walked to the bathroom, opened the medicine cabinet, and swallowed every pill on the boat. This included half a bottle of Xanax, several Vicodin, and a handful of unidentified pills. These, I washed down with some green Chartreuse, and then I slashed my wrists with an ordinary steak knife. I then got into bed, and turned on the movie I’d been watching–Seance on a Wet Afternoon. That is the last thing I remember of that lovely evening.

I went to bed late, and woke up early, had breakfast at a nearby restaurant with my mother and her husband. After a couple of slices of French toast with vaguely maple syrup, I waved goodbye to them in the parking lot and drove myself home.

Cory, whom I’d left sleeping, was still asleep. My cat wound around my ankles, hinting for food. For no immediately discernible reason, I burst into tears. As I cried, I tried to reason myself out of it. There was no crisis, nothing that required a display of emotion. I tried to focus on the way the morning light came through my drawn curtains, the chirping of birds outside, the sensation of breathing, the temporary nature of all emotion. Finally, I just crawled back into bed and let tears roll, irritatingly, into my ears.

Mornings seem to be the hardest time to get through. Accustomed to years of waking up alone while the Keelhauler worked offshore, I do not mind the solitude. In trying to reason through my crying jag, I realized that there must have been a moment where I’d forgotten we had broken up. I can’t quite articulate what I mean. I’m used to waking up alone, with the unconscious knowledge that my boyfriend is absent, but that our relationship exists. I think that, this morning, I had a sudden and painful realization that my boyfriend is, in fact, gone, that he is actively avoiding me, is not interested in talking to me. I think that, for a second, I must have wondered what he was doing on this beautiful Saturday morning, and then realized that I won’t know, and that he doesn’t want me to know.

Meanwhile, back in the bed, Cory turned over and opened his arms to gather me in. I think he’s often puzzled by my morning tears, but today, he held me tight and told me over and over that everything would be ok.