Back on the boat, I found myself sitting at a table talking with one of my uncles and some other people, and the conversation quickly becoming heated. He got off on some ridiculous conservative rant that really set me off, to the point where I finally got up from the table and said that I was tired of having the same argument with him, and that if he wanted to know how I felt, he could just look at Facebook because we had literally had the same argument online several years earlier.
From there I stormed off and found myself looking for a quiet place to write about all that we had just seen. I ended up in the lounge in the back of the ship where they were serving drinks and desserts – I first ran across one of my old bosses and his wife who happened to be on the same trip, but it was like I wasn’t supposed to talk to them because they didn’t seem to have any dialog other than, “Hello…” when I approached.
Anyways, I ended up taking a corner of a table where a couple of other guests sat and wrote while I sipped a drink, listening to Jimmy Buffett’s Trying to Reason with the Hurricane Season being played by the band as I wrote.
People came and left as I jotted more things down until the tempo began to pick up a little and I was ready to leave as a newer crowd came into the bar. Somehow in my departure, however, I angered this really beefy guy who had clearly already been drinking because for some reason suddenly he wanted to fight me.
The guy’s muscles were huge and I knew that I didn’t have a chance, but when he came at me and took his first swing, I somehow blocked it like a pro and then came back at him with a flurry of punches to the chest and one last one to the gut that put him on the ground. But I didn’t even stop there, moving up to continue punching and kicking him to make sure that he knew that he had messed with the wrong guy.
For my final move, I kicked him hard and the guy went flying through the glass window out onto the open deck behind us
That’s when I ran.
I’m not sure if I was running from the guy that I had just knocked out or maybe the staff for starting a fight on the boat, but I zigzagged my way through the ship several times, looking into a room for the guy before I would enter any of them, until I finally just gave up and went back to my room to lay low for a while.
I pictured just hiding there for the rest of the trip, afraid to be spotted by the guy who would clearly be seeking his revenge, and that’s when the siren went off across the ship.
There was another giant wave coming, and this time we weren’t safe because there was a broken window on the sixth floor that would let the water in…