Two Boats and a Sinking Feeling

 

Two Boats and a Sinking Feeling  (Audio Deep Dive English; Audio Deep Dive Bangla)

There are people who try to live with one foot on each of two boats, and don’t we all know one, or perhaps—brace yourself—you are one. The boats can be anything: two incompatible companions, two divergent cities, two competing careers, two distinct identities, two fantasies pretending to be life choices. From a distance it looks impressive—balanced, worldly, evolved—but life has absolutely no patience for emotional acrobatics, and sooner or later the elegant pose becomes an involuntary split. You can keep the illusion alive for a while, convince yourself both boats are somehow gliding in synchrony, and say noble lines like “I belong to both places equally” or “Both companions matter in their own ways,” which is adorable until you realize the universe is snickering because every boat has its own current and eventually they drift apart, leaving you wobbling between them with a smile that’s starting to look like pain. This isn’t just geography or friendship; this is narrative management, the human sport of running two incompatible stories simultaneously while pretending they harmonize. You edit, conceal, synchronize, and write your life like a novelist with a twitchy editor, desperately trying to make two plotlines believable at once. But narratives are never equally weighted; one always wins, one boat always gets the real steering wheel while the other becomes the scenic detour you swear is “just as important,” and your actions—faster replies, deeper care, more presence—betray the hierarchy no matter what inspirational captions you paste over it. Some people are professional two-boat riders—they anticipate the chaos, chart the tides, rehearse the exits, and keep both stories fed just enough to survive—but most people stumble into the two-boat routine powered by delusion and optimism, imagining the balancing act requires no strategy. Spoiler: it does. Without it, the whole thing collapses into a farce. And when it unravels—because it always does—it’s the same ending: one boat is lost, the narrative tied to it collapses, and the people, places, memories, and emotions evaporate like a deleted file, leaving the remaining boat sailing onward—lighter maybe, but unmistakably emptier. And this is where things get wonderfully haunted, because the people who once mattered in the abandoned narrative never disappear—they become ghosts, loyal in the worst possible way, hanging around in songs, smells, names, and cities like atmospheric static you pretend not to notice. You can delete photos, unfollow accounts, erase chats, but the ghosts keep the passwords, and the real entertainment begins when the shiny new narrative arrives and everyone in it quietly panics at the possibility of the ghosts showing up. The new cast understands instinctively that ghosts have seniority—they were there first, they know the raw footage, the deleted scenes, the contradictions, the early promises, the emotional fingerprints—and that alone is enough to make every cheerful “Who’s that?” when an old name appears on your phone. And because the rider of the boats knows this too, they engage in the modern art of soft ghosting: attempting to erase certain people while publicly pretending they still exist in the story, offering them just enough crumbs to keep them docile while praying they never appear in person. It's a delicate ballet: ghost them, but not completely; exile them, but not officially; keep them out of the narrative, but maintain the illusion that they’re somehow “still part of it,” because if they realize they’ve been written out, they might come back with the receipts. The fear is simple and deliciously human: if the ghosts ever speak, the chosen boat might learn the truth—that its entire narrative is built on creative editing—and that possibility is enough to send everyone into quiet lockdown mode, checking the horizon for familiar silhouettes while pretending everything is serene. Meanwhile, the rider insists they’ve “moved on,” a phrase that sounds efficient but is really just socially acceptable mourning, because to admit otherwise would require acknowledging they were never standing on two boats—they were simply too afraid to choose one. So if you insist on trying this stunt, bring a life jacket; balance is temporary, gravity is consistent, and the splash—when it comes—will be entirely your own fault. Two boats, one rider, one ending. The math always checks out. Just like Neil Diamond sang and said, “But I got an emptiness deep inside.”