In this intimate personal essay, Kelly Gunn takes us from childhood memories on her father’s sailboat to the shores of Montenegro, reflecting on grief, identity, and the unexpected ways life guides us back to ourselves.
words and photography by Kelly Gunn
Some of my earliest memories begin with the sound of wind moving through the mast of my dad’s sailboat.
If you’ve ever slept in the cockpit of a sailboat, you know the sound. Halyards tapping against the mast. The gentle rocking that eventually becomes so familiar you stop noticing it. Cool air on sunburned skin. A sky full of stars where a ceiling should have been.
My dad passed away twenty-five years ago. The boat is long gone. But every time I hear a mast sing in the wind, I’m a little girl again. Funny how memory works. It doesn’t always return through photographs. Sometimes it arrives through sound.
When I think about my dad, I don’t picture a living room or a camping trip. I picture water. If I pull out old photo albums, chances are he’s wearing sunglasses, squinting into the sun, standing at the helm, or has one of us girls on his lap.
Most of my memories of him happened there. Most of our photographs did too.
Maybe that’s why boats have never felt like objects to me. They’ve always felt like where life happened. Maybe that’s why I’ve always found my way back to the sea.
California.
Hawaii.
Belize.
Virginia.
Croatia.
Greece.
Now Montenegro.
For a girl who grew up sleeping in the cockpit of a sailboat, that’s either one hell of a coincidence…or life has been trying to get my attention for decades, and I’m just slower than I thought.
As a kid, my sister and I built a little fort along the Chesapeake Bay. One of our favorite things to do was write notes, tuck them inside empty bottles, and throw them into the water. We were convinced someone would find them. Or a pirate. Honestly, either outcome felt equally exciting. Looking back, I don’t think I ever outgrew that game. I just changed what I put inside the bottle.
It became impossible to ignore over a cappuccino in Montenegro. I wasn’t trying to write an essay. I was trying to figure out what came next.
“Funny how memory works. It doesn’t always return through photographs. Sometimes it arrives through sound.”
For months I’d convinced myself I needed to become a better coach. A better marketer. A better entrepreneur. Instead, somewhere between a notebook, another sailboat drifting across the Adriatic, and a conversation that somehow kept getting deeper, I laughed out loud.
Motherfucker… this is it.
Years before that morning in Montenegro, I’d started a swimwear company called NAU. Most people saw swimsuits. I saw stories. Every collection began with an artist because I wanted to know where they felt most alive. That place became the collection. The photography. The soundtrack. The handwritten postcards tucked into every order.
Looking back, I wasn’t building a swimwear company. I was building little worlds. At the time, I thought I was selling beautiful swimsuits. And they were beautiful.
But what I was really creating was anticipation. An atmosphere. A small invitation to imagine yourself somewhere beautiful before you ever packed a suitcase. Not the destination. The version of ourselves that somehow always seems to show up when we’re there.
For almost a year after retiring NAU, I barely thought about it. Honestly, I was relieved. I’d spent years trying to carve out space in an industry overflowing with beautiful swimwear. I was tired of hustling. Tired of chasing sales. Tired of believing the next collection had to outperform the last.
Then life handed me an exit.
A relationship ended in a way I never could have imagined. I packed up my life, left the islands behind, quietly retired the company… and not long after, I was diagnosed with breast cancer.
That chapter deserved to end.
What surprised me wasn’t that I missed NAU. It was what I missed about it.
I missed sitting at a table covered in fabric swatches, playlists, sketches, photographs, postcards, and handwritten notes. I missed asking artists to tell me about the place they loved most. I missed obsessing over details almost nobody else would notice. The soundtrack. The anticipation. The thank-you postcard tucked into every order.
“Maybe loss feels so absolute because we’ve accidentally packed parts of ourselves into things that were only ever meant to carry us for a while.”
Closing the company wasn’t the loss. Realizing I’d confused the business with the place my creativity lived… That was.
For a long time, I thought I was grieving a company.
I wasn’t.
I was grieving a boat.
Maybe grief isn’t something we finish. Maybe it’s just another way love keeps changing shape. That would explain a lot.
It would explain how I could feel relieved to close one chapter and still mourn what it had quietly given me.
Maybe that’s what we all do.
We mistake the vessel for what it was carrying.
We grieve the marriage believing it took our capacity to love.
We grieve the career believing it took our ambition.
We grieve the business believing it took our creativity.
We grieve the life we thought we’d have believing it took our future.
We grieve our bodies believing they took our confidence.
Maybe loss feels so absolute because we’ve accidentally packed parts of ourselves into things that were only ever meant to carry us for a while.
Standing in Montenegro, watching another sailboat disappear into the Adriatic, I started looking backward instead of forward.
Not because I wanted my old life back. I didn’t. I was curious.
Why had these same ideas kept finding me?
The boats. My dad. Messages in bottles drifting across the Chesapeake Bay. A paper boat tattoo I’d chosen simply because I loved boats. NAU. The playlists. The postcards. The sea. Life had been trying to get my attention. I just kept overlooking it.
I’d spent years assuming clarity would arrive like lightning. Instead, it wandered in quietly, sat down across from me with a cappuccino…and was, quite honestly, irritatingly simple.
The paper boat tattoo still makes me laugh. When I got it, I wasn’t trying to say anything profound. I just loved boats. My dad loved boats. Boats were where life happened. Paper simply made it feel different.
Years later, I looked down at it and smiled. Paper has absolutely no business surviving in water. And somehow…there it was. Still with me.
Life had been trying to get my attention all along. I just hadn’t been still enough to listen.
Maybe the better question isn’t what you’ve lost.
Maybe it’s this:
What part of yourself have you accidentally packed into something that was only ever meant to carry you for a while?
