Odissey

            I am named after the sea, a fascination my father and I have always shared. For us, breathing in the maresia and watching the ocean means stealing away minutes of calm from a frenetic life. Even when I was small and my worries and responsibilities were proportional to my size, the vastness of the water gave me a feeling of freedom and endless possibility that I loved, a feeling that my father, my partner in sea-watching, has made tangible.

            Months ago, he announced he would leave in February to sail the world alone for two years, maybe three. Shock – that was my first reaction. Can you do that? I thought. Are people allowed to quit their job and sail? I smiled and nodded, but I wasn’t listening. I felt shattered, confused. Most of all, I felt abandoned. How unhappy do you have to be to leave everything behind? I knew he was. Unhappy, I mean. His passion, his curiosity, his imagination never fit within the walls of an office and the time frame of a 9-to-5 job.

            When I was little, my father tucked me into bed each night and told me adventure stories. Around the World in 80 Days, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe. Though he had read them in his adolescence, he recited them from memory. I was five or six, and in the darkness of my room, the sparkle in his eyes and electricity in his voice enraptured me in tales of exotic lands, of struggle, of glory and triumph.

            His favorite was The Odyssey.

            As I watched the Mediterranean this summer, the sea that Odysseus sailed and my father will travel, I remembered his stories for the first time in many years, and I understood that the spark in his eyes when he speaks of his journey is the same as when he spoke of every hero's journey. He will not battle the Cyclops or face Scylla, but to embark on this expedition, he faced seemingly invincible monsters: his fears, his sense of duty, his feeling that it's too late to start over. More than unhappiness, I realize now, it takes courage. To conquer the sea, he has conquered his own life.

            When my father was my storyteller, he was my ultimate hero. "I was named 'Alexandre' after Alexander the Great," he joked, and I believed him, believed he was as great as the Macedonian. I am now seventeen, and I would like to think that all illusions of my father's perfection have long gone. Yet despite the flaws I now see in him, and he is my hero again, no longer just on principle, but for pushing my realm of possibilities, for teaching me to dream and dare more than I thought I was allowed to.

            “I was inspired by the poem ‘Invictus’”, he told me, and quoted: “I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.” (*) As I prepare to leave my own safe port to navigate the unclear and unchartered waters of college life in another country, I too carry these words as my compass.

(*) from the poem Invictus, by William Ernest Heinley