The last five days spent at sea between Hawaii and Canada were very long and very difficult. I greatly feared bumping into the horrible German man again, the one that had laughed at Dea's misfortune, and this fear led me to spend the majority of the time hiding in my room. Of course I had to venture out sometimes, usually to get food, and this was always a journey of some anxiety for me. I had to go up two flights of stairs and along the length of the ship to get to the buffet, and I saw the German man everywhere along the way. It wasn't that I actually saw him everywhere, of course, but he was fairly old, overweight, balding, with a little white/grey hair, and there were in the region of 700 other people on board that matched this description. Around every corner and at every table, every deck chair, I thought I saw him and panicked.

It wasn't that I was scared of him, just that I hated having this bad blood with someone, and I was keen to avoid another interaction with him. I had actually seen him again on the day that Dea had left, a few hours after our initial altercation. I'd sat down next to him and his group, and actually apologised for getting angry, but that I thought it wrong of him to laugh when I told him my girlfriend needed to get to a doctor. He flat out denied having laughed, which was ridiculous, because he had quite obviously laughed several times, quite heartily. And any chance of making friends was gone when his wife loudly interjected to repeatedly tell me I was a “bad man, a bad, bad man. Hitting an old man like that. You're such a bad man.” Never mind the fact that he deserved it, or that he wasn't really that old, or that he was twice my size, or that I didn't actually hit him. So long as they were going to insist that I went around punching old men without reason (I don't do that, honest) there seemed little hope of reconciliation, and all I could do was try to avoid them.

I did this primarily by lying in bed feeling sorry for myself, as sad as this was. There was a Dea-shaped space on the other side of the bed, that nothing, not even a cuddly toy koala could fill. On the floor sat a bottle of sparkling wine in an ice bucket. The ice had long since melted of course, along with all of our hopes for this cruise. I felt so terribly alone now. All there was to do was watch movies. The TV in the room played four different movies, each one on repeat throughout the day. The day when I watched all four was when I started to think I might be in trouble. But then the day when I started watching the same movie twice was when I knew I was. And it had George Clooney in it as well.

I thought I'd better get out of the room and do something, evil German man or not. I started to spend more time out on deck watching the ocean. One day when I was doing this I saw lots of pieces of coloured plastic floating in the water. I guessed we were passing through the big plastic waste area people talk about in the middle of the Pacific. It wasn't like it covered the whole sea or anything, but there was way more plastic than there should be thousands of miles from land. On another day, a more cheerful sighting was of some dolphins, although they were going the other way, and looked tiny from up top of our big boat, and to be honest I wasn't even sure if they were dolphins. I also began to play more sports, although of course I had no one to play with, and had to be creative, and invented a really rather fun one-player game that was somehow a cross between basketball and 'headers and volleys'.

Each day I checked my emails and at least the news from Copenhagen was getting more positive. Having made it safely back, Dea had been rushed through to the best eye doctors in Denmark, who had been able to make a more certain diagnosis. Apparently, after barraging her eye with anti-bacterial, anti-viral, and anti-fungal eye drops, it turned out her infection was caused by an amoeba. So she was now taking anti-amoeba eye drops, and the white spot was finally just starting to shrink. Even so, the doctors warned that it could take up to six months of treatment, and potentially she could still require corneal replacement surgery after that. I felt so bad that I was not with her to comfort her through this, but I knew that her sister in Copenhagen was looking after her now, and as soon as I could get off this boat I would be racing towards her again.

On the final sea day I stood out on deck wrapped in several layers of clothes and a warm jacket. The air had grown colder and colder as we'd headed further north, and that North Pacific chill whipped against my face as we neared our destination. This cruise had certainly not been what I'd hoped for, not even close. It had been a very long and demanding experience, but in a way I appreciated that. It made me recognise just how huge and unforgiving a place the Pacific Ocean really is, in a way I never could have from an aeroplane. Unless, perhaps, the aeroplane crashed, and I'd got stranded on a deserted island, like in Castaway, staring Tom Hanks, one of the better movies I watched.