From Dream to Reality.

Is it possible for your brain to wrap around being so close to achieving a dream? Is it comprehendible after almost 20 years of imagining, that the dream will actually be in front of you soon? I truly can’t say that my brain is grasping what is about to happen. 

I remember the day Ari and I saw the documentary ‘Maindentrip’. A teenage girl sailed solo around the world. And I remember Ari saying, “I am going to sail around the world”. At the time, also being a teenager, the thought to me was unthinkable. My life at the time focused on school, getting into college, choosing a career path. The way I was brought up, sailing around the world seemed like an unthinkable, unimaginable, somewhat irresponsible feat. Although unconsciously, the seed had been planted. 

For Ari’s 15^th birthday his dad gifted him ‘Anny’, a 5.5 metre sailboat, the same one that his dad grew up sailing on. Ari spent the better half of high school restoring her and I was helping whenever he would call me out of high school. We spent many lazy days sailing her on Lake Michigan without a care in the world. Just the other day, I was reminiscing about the summer I spent every day on Anny. I would drive my old Toyota 15 minutes to the marina. Ari was working as a dock master at the time and would drive me out to Anny in the morning and pick me up after his shift some time later. I spent the days reading, cat napping on sails in the cockpit, cooling off in the water, and then repeat. It was a truly magical, carefree, incredible summer. 

That’s the last time I remember feeling so free. 

Eventually, Ari and I moved in together our first year of college. We continued sailing Anny until one day I arrived home from school to find Ari on the ground with a giant grin on his face. “I found the boat”. A few days later, we were the proud owners of Wildfire, a 1961 Javelin Bill Tripp design. Soon followed the giant map pinned to our wall with pins inserted into all of the places I wanted to see in the world. And so the seed started to sprout.

I didn’t know it then, but the dreaming, the imagining – I would get so excited at the possibilities. But soon, my brain would shut that down and go back to what was easy to grasp – studying, exams, chasing a career. It was always a back and forth in my brain from the start – the excitement of freedom vs the sobering of reality. Or better said, the reality that was imprinted in me from childhood. 

These past few days, this same back and forth has been consuming me, stealing my presence and awareness. My brain is struggling to comprehend what is coming, skipping from sheer excitement to all the to do lists that are easy to understand. 

Now, all these years later, I sit here trying to understand what it means that Wildfire is being launched in a week. For so long, Wildfire has just been a thought, a quiet dream. A dream of freedom, of exploration, of having the chance to relive a childhood I was deprived of. Can I understand beforehand that a dream of 20 years will soon be a reality? Can I understand the emotions that will be brought forth? Can I wrap my brain around what a tremendous accomplishment this is?

-Yuliya Wolf