This is one of the chapters I cut from Abandoned Ship during my final rewrite. Once I had the nearly-complete book in front of me, I realized that this chapter didn’t really fit anywhere anymore. But I still like the basic idea, and I thought you guys might be interested in reading it.
In fact, this was one of the first chapters I wrote, within the first few weeks after Emily and I got home from Italy. (The first thing I wrote was the op-ed, which I scribbled into a notebook from my seat on the plane home from Italy, and which now appears in chapter 55 of the book.) Anyhow, back then, the working title of the whole book was actually “The Cupcake”, and this chapter was the justification for that title.
Enjoy!
We talked and talked and talked.
At first, we didn’t think much about the words we used.
The shipwreck. The crash. The evacuation.
The incident. The accident. The disaster. The ordeal.
Again and again, we talked about the rope ladder, the captain, the cruise company, the Italian police, the U.S. Embassy, the Chinese Ambassador. We told journalists what happened during the tragedy, and how and when and why, and then we talked to news networks about the way the news networks were covering the accident. The catastrophe. The calamity.
At a certain point, the words and phrases in those stories started to crystallize and become a thing of their own. When we told our story, it started to become Our Story. The improvised explanations evolved into rehearsed monologue. We learned for ourselves which parts of the narrative were most important, and we began to figure out the overarching themes. As those bits of story came together into a canonical account, we wondered: what do we call this thing?
The shipwreck? The accident? The disaster?
Any of those words would have been true, and any of them could have worked well as a brand name for the whole experience: The Costa Concordia Catastrophe of 2012.
But the words left a sour taste in our mouths. Talking about disasters and calamities every day started to become visceral and excruciating. The words themselves left pain in our throats and darkness in our hearts.
One afternoon, about ten days after the accident incident calamity disaster ordeal, it dawned on us that we could use whatever words we wanted. We could stop repeating those sharp-edged words all day every day, and replace them with something nice. Something sweet and comforting and warm.
And so we started calling it “The Cupcake”.
And in doing so, we started thinking about the parts of our experience that nourished us.
“The best part of the cupcake was when you held those women’s hands and told them they’d see their husbands soon.”
“My favorite part of the cupcake was the innkeeper.”
“I’ll never forget the song you sang me during the cupcake.”
We’re still not recovered from the shipwreck. Sometimes we have nightmares about the accident. And we’ll probably be haunted by this catastrophe for years.
Still, though, we’re grateful we got to have a cupcake.
