“There’s so much,” he answered. “The most obvious is how often I felt the sting of my father’s belt. Even though this was also common in other families we knew, that’s no excuse. Mom cried too—she stood in the next room and sobbed, he could hear it through the wall, that’s how loud it was, as if she wanted me to hear that she couldn’t do anything. Even though it was her decision, she encouraged him, he just did what she convinced him was the right thing to do, what fathers were supposed to do.

“But my mother was the one who made the big decisions,” Magnus continued. For him, for me, for all of us. She controlled us with her hands, the hands she wiped on her apron, and with those disapproving sighs and encouraging smiles. . . . Or maybe it wasn’t her, after all, maybe it was the expectations they felt the world had of them, but which they actually produced by themselves. These expectations still control them. They say that they want me to become an engineer, do something more with my life than they have done, because they believe it’s right, the only way. My mother and father, they are so traditional that it burns me up inside, tears me apart, but nonetheless, that’s what keeps them on their feet, I think. They know the rules, they know this game, they know what’s allowed and what is forbidden, and God forbid they should decide to step over the line.

“I feel bad for them,” he once said. “And at the same time, I’m furious with them.”

“Don’t be.”

“Will it make it better if I laugh at them?”

“I don’t know.”

“It would be better if I could laugh. Maybe the objective should be to laugh—do you think so? If I can learn to laugh at them, then I will avoid turning out like them? I will be different?”

“You’re already different.”

“Are you sure?”

“You’ve been different ever since the first time I saw you.”

“Or was it you who made me different?”

“I think we should practice laughing.”

It’s perhaps his laughter that still inhabits me. I can’t get rid of it, the way it rocks inside me, along with the waves.

The boat is still moving, but it’s completely different now—rocking on gentle swells from the storm that has blown over, slowly moving back and forth, the weary waves sliding away.

My boat, Blue, I fall asleep on it. I can’t even manage to sleep with one eye open any longer—my body keeps letting me down, maybe because he is still aching inside me, aching because he let me down.