Dramamine

Grant leans against the railing of our cruise ship, shaking his head in astonishment. "Wow," is the best he can come up with, his eyes carefully tracing the complete horizon around him. The color blue is omnipresent and impressive. The air is hot and it's quiet and the only waves we see come from the wake coming off our ship; everything else is kind of a perfect flat blue surface. Craning our necks over the rail, everything appears so far away. Even at sea level, we now know how people standing on top of Mount Everest must feel looking down on the world. From where we're watching, the Atlantic Ocean looks like it will never come to an end.

Grant says to me, "Can you believe that this is what most of the world looks like?"

It was that kind of rare quiet moment within our non-stop 72-hour party that briefly put things in perspective. Inside that boat, we had amnesia. We were a self-contained paradise taking our sweet time slicing through the ocean at only 5 MPH, eating several gourmet entrees in a sitting, perpetually drinking, constantly screaming and laughing. There was no concept of money. There were no regrets. Even when we took an excursion to the Bahamas, the only world that we knew existed was from the bow to the stern.

And on the last night of the cruise, even some sobering bad news from the outside world that came to me in the form of a cell phone voice message couldn't stop the steady stream of carefreeness -- or shall I say "carefreedom" -- that I felt while smoking a cigar with all my buddies on our private deck. It was my first Cuban, and everything else was equally perfect: I held a whiskey in one hand, Mark and I sang along to my favorite Bob Marley song "Three Little Birds", the mainland approaching in the far distance made us feel like Christopher Columbus, every star in the sky was visible, and as if on cue, I even saw my first shooting star. I didn't feel the need to make a wish.

It was an unforgettable time, but then of course everything about leaving the ship the next morning felt difficult and uncomfortable, especially the goodbyes to the new friends we'd made. You know how awkward it is to spend so much energy and emotion saying goodbye to someone and then you keep bumping into them afterward, like in the lobby, and then in the elevator, and then in the parking lot? And you never know whether you should say goodbye again, or what? Everybody wants to do a decent job saying goodbye, but sometimes when you've had such a great time, it's just not possible.

I thought about this again when the shuttle dropped all of us off to our respective airport terminals and we went our separate ways. I wanted to get it right with Stewart, so in a text message I thanked him again for inviting me out to the bachelor party of a lifetime. I wasn't sure if he would get it before his plane departed, but then he finally replied, "no, thank you. it was the best time ever."