Ghost Ships

“I'll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore.”

I don’t remember when or why I came across this beautiful quote from Cheryl Strayed. But I both treasure and fight against its wisdom. Because I wonder often about the ghost ships I didn’t board. And I find it difficult to salute some of them, watching them sail away. Especially as some are so very far now.

There is a version of myself in my imagination that never came to America. She is the Martyna that stayed in Poland, even as hundreds of thousands left after the fall of communism. She lives as a separate person in my mind though her specifics are a blur. There’s another version of Martyna who moved to London once Poland entered the EU in 2004. That one has deep relationships with her Polish family, as she might have been able to visit more, and she has a fabulous accent. Though today she might be back in Poland, after Brexit, living in her small apartment with a recently arrived Ukrainian refugee mother and daughter. There are many other variations of Martyna’s life in the multiverse (including ones where certain wars were lost…or never began…global and international and personal wars…). But I think every so often of those specific two versions, defined by the directions of a particular mass migration of Polish people out of the country of our birth. I think of them usually when things aren’t going well here in America. I wonder if either of them would be playwrights.

I wonder if my immigrant mother who brought me to America with her, just the two of us, this person I love more than anyone in the world, who endlessly fascinates me, I wonder if she wonders about her ghost ships. I wonder this almost as much as I wonder about my own.

I wonder if Rana wonders about hers. Or Shideh or Zari. I wonder if that’s what Salme was doing, in that moment... or how much Nazanin wonders, still.

I wonder if every immigrant is connected in this kind of wondering. And every daughter of an immigrant mother, whether she was begun here – or there.

I’m in the fortunate position where the country I was born in is one that I could return to. For one, it still exists. Same name, same language. It is not currently assaulted by war, even as it borders it. But my sleepless night thoughts are not about moving. They’re about what was already lost and built in the time between then and now. The paths that were interrupted. What those paths might have intersected or connected. The choice which spiraled into more choices…into the things I could not have anticipated…those global and international and personal things which would inform even more choices…until here it is, this life of mine, with all its losses and blessings.

But what else could have been? 

What other courses charted?

When should I have stayed when I left? When should I have left when I stayed?

And would anybody guard the prayer stone I may have left behind? 

Sanaz Toossi’s heart-rich ode of a play charts the sparks and the launches of many ships, the surprises and re-directions of five women’s lives over 13 years, beginning at a port of deep friendship. It conjures the children some of these women will bring into the world — as well as into which world – and in that, the beginnings of their own losses and blessings. A lot can happen in a year. So very, very much can happen in thirteen. That is the brilliance of Sanaz’s structure. Imagine if you could encounter yourself, a year from now, or two or three, the memory of who you were still freshly dissolving over this new present moment. It’s so fresh that you can still make out the certainty of your prior hopes and plans. You can still hear the echoes of a laugh, a promise, a declaration. “I’ll never.” Or “I’ll always.”

You can make a promise to yourself, to your life. You can make a pact with your friends, with your family. You can make plans. And a government can betray you.

Then another choice must be made. Stay or go. And a ship is launched.

If you’ve chosen to leave, and if you look back, you’ll see there’s someone waving to you from the shore, as you recede from them and they recede from you.

I think it will be those people, your people, your people, your friends who knew you, who know you, who will forever contain those parts of you that you leave behind. Even as you forget or abandon those parts of yourself. Even as they forget or abandon those parts of themselves.

I glimpse one of my mother’s ghost ships – the one where she stayed – whenever I hear her on the phone with my godmother. Which is every Sunday. She glows and unfurls in a way like at no other time, speaking to the woman who grew up (and still lives) right across the street from our old apartment in Bytom, Poland. Her dearest friend who stayed firmly and beautifully in my mother’s life even as she began a new one an ocean away. I will never know my mother like Marysia knows her. I am jealous of this but also marrow-and-soul-deep happy for it. That my mother, amidst the varied slings and arrows of migration and the life that followed, has had this eternal friendship which so contains her. Then and now.

As I watched the final scene of Wish You Were Here, I thought about the numerous calls that contain versions of former selves webbing across the globe right now. Ghost ships. I thought about the various Ukrainian women’s voices now scattered across Europe connecting to the various Ukrainian women’s voices back in Kyiv and Kharkiv. In Bucha. I thought about a woman’s voice in San Jose, and later perhaps Orange County, connecting to another woman’s voice in Karaj, Iran. I think of them now as I think about Justyna’s voice in New Jersey connecting to Marysia’s voice in Bytom. In my imagination, all of them are looking out of windows.

I don’t know you, Sanaz, but I strongly feel the love and longing and wonder in your beautiful play. For your mother’s life and for all the women at the precipices of their futures and also deep within them. And for our lives – for yours and mine. I feel your yearning for the futures we didn’t choose or weren’t able to, as well as your compassion for the ones we did, the ones we’re living now. Yours is one of those plays that makes me feel so much less alone in this world in which my ship has found itself. Thank you for what you did for my heart.

Photos provided by Martyna Majok.

Martyna Majok was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play, Cost of Living, which will debut on Broadway this fall. Other plays include Sanctuary City, Queens, and Ironbound. Martyna is currently writing a musical adaptation of The Great Gatsby, with music by Florence Welch and Thomas Bartlett, and developing projects for TV and film.