The Island

Chapter 7

The wind rustles in through the slit, soft and fragile. The barren night holds no peace for my mind. It is so tame compared to the roaring wind and the tumbling waves that heckled me throughout the journey. And yet, the quiet bothers me in another way. It uneases me. There can't be nothing going on. Back when I was a child, all there was was nothing. But now my mind has grown, and the emptiness of the night leaves it exposed to the wilderness of my thoughts.

Lying there, alone in a wooden cabin, I finally realize just how far I am from home. I am in the middle of nowhere, just me and five others. There is no town I can look out on when I open the door, no mother I can count on to be there in the morning. Only five fishermen whom I have just met, who have yet to greet me.

I thought that being alone would fix all my problems, but the isolation of the cabin is no refuge. Within the tight cabin walls there still exists a reminder of the life that will take over once I am outside of them. There is no refuge from it, this life, no cure for the pain that accompanies it. I used to be able to escape; when I was young, the sea was my safe haven. Then I grew older, and found shelter in a dank alleyway. But a child is allowed to run away. A little girl is allowed to throw a tantrum. A sailor though? A sailor can be nothing but stalwart and stoic. A sailor must have a heart made of iron and hands wrought with red endurance. How can I find refuge from myself? I am tired of this role already, and the journey has just begun.

In the absence of sleep, time slowly trickles by, like sand down an hourglass. Every hour, every minute really, that I am not asleep weakens me all the more for the journey to come. Time has that effect, like a ripple. If you do not spend one moment wisely, then it will reverberate into the future, disrupting the stream of one's consciousness.

My thoughts are the pebbles carelessly tossed into the river. Maybe their ripples seem small individually, insignificant in the scope of the long night, but toss enough in and the flow will stop completely. Then the ripples will keep piling up on each other, emanating pain through the future, while the present remains a blockade.

My thoughts pile on top of each other, forming a great mountain of waste within the reef of my mind. Thinking about the journey ahead, thinking about the one behind; another pebble, another ripple. My mother laying on her bed, not saying a word after I came home from the alley. A great boulder, a trembling blow that echoes into the heavens. My fear, my anger, my frustration. Ripple, ripple, ripple. Sully looking down at me, saying I'm sorry. Another ripple from the other side, dropped from the roof of the subconscious sky. The torrent of tears, the waves of embarrassment. Pebbles rain down. I watch helplessly as the mountain grows, piercing the spectating clouds, piercing the world above, piercing all of time with its ripples. One for my sorrow, one for my despair. A thunderstorm for my journey to come, a droplet for how I shall face it. I stare helplessly at the horrid manifestation of all my thoughts. That immovable mountain. That stalwart sentinel that fends off the onslaught of sleep, of thoughtlessness. Perhaps I can climb it, then slide down into the blissful creek below, where I long so greatly to be. But I would never make it even halfway to the top before the pebbles would cascade down upon me and entrench me at its foot, a corpse to rest alongside the other dead thoughts, full of life when they fell, full of death when they crashed. The spire is tapping at the edge of my brain, piercing my mind, cutting it, slashing across its gentle fabric. It is torture.

There used to be a way I could get rid of it. Knock it all down in a single blow, watch that great mountain crumble from on high. I was nowhere near strong enough to move that mountain, nobody was. Only something as persistent as the thoughts, as forceful as inertia. Something that would always be there, so that even when I was entangled in the middle of an alleyway three miles past nowhere, I could feel its pulse.

Whenever there were too many thoughts—worrying about my father and my brothers, thinking about the Freedom Fishers—I would step outside into my backyard and open my ears so full so that the waves that came crashing through them had enough strength to barrel down the mountain completely.