Rejection

Weight of the world comes sliping down over my halter-bit, and strikes back at my neck. In giving myself to this intent, I have come further than ever, tendons straining and breaking at the thought of pushing one more day through the muck. Your favorite doctor is the one who gives you this broken formula, the solution to your answers, the nagging question underneath the ringing ears and the days spent scarred and weary returning from the Outlands.

I walk up from the beach and struggle to discern one thing from another. There are diseased-looking pieces of driftwood here, branches involuted and upheaved from somewhere strange and unworldly. An endless shore, the drift stretches for miles. Above, only an almost cloudless sky, with a curved knife-edge of white at the horizon, a slipknot around the breaking waves in the distance. A seemingly eternal high-pressure front sweeps the sky clear of anything clouding the transparent, seamless blue. In the morning the sun glares through a specter in red, and at night the purple-black bruise darkens slowly until the sun disappears and the entire sky switches to black in an almost singular effort. The single feathery cloud at the eastern sea horizon never leaves, never grows, never flutters an eyelid. At the outer edge of the world, there must be torment and turmoil, there must be somewhere displacing all this serenity so that it spills over onto this land here. It can't be this way everywhere.

'How did I get here?' This is the arbitrary question of the day. It is as arbitrary as any other question, as the questions of concern and pity and doubt: 'Are they looking for me?' 'Will they ever find me?' 'What could it matter anyway?' The endless repeated mantra of self-delusion that once kept me afloat has become a comfort rather than a neurosis. The more pressing questions of shelter and food and companionship are taken care of before they are even described by the mind's formless paintbrush.

The temperature is cool at night, but not uncomfortable, and during the day becomes hot but not unbearable. There is plenty of shade at any rate to shield one from the sun's impenetrable stare, underneath the broad-leaf palms up on the sandbar just below the dunes. Eating is unnecessary; I have not been hungry for weeks, having last consumed a half a coconut and the mild, watery milk contained within. There are plenty of fallen coconuts and very little effort to break them open. Very little energy required, too. A real hearty meal is only a sincere pleasure if it is preceded by a hard-won battle with Labor, who is conspicuously absent from here. My skin has begun to hang from my bones, my ribs yawn through the musculature meant to bind them, and my back, though I cannot see it, is surely punctuated by the rounded, bony protrusions of my scapulae and vertebrae. My eyes are likely as hollow and sunken as a half-coconut in the sand. My teeth haven't begun to ache, so I assume they are still amenable to pestulary grinding; coconut flesh is soft, too.

As for companionship, there is none necessary. Every day is more beautiful than the last. I rarely feel alone, and contemplation of the weary forms that wash up on shore and are subsequently dragged back to sea - bundles of thick, ropy kelp, crabs, the occasional tortoise, and seagulls and terns, in addition to new sepulchres in the driftwood graveyard - keeps me endlessly fascinated. I make the same observations, nearly every day a repetition of form and function, never recording anything nor feeling the urge to make contact with the system I have run across: this endless devoury, the cycle of birth and rebirth, death and decay.

Nor have I any urge to share: 'What would be the point?' I am bound to ask myself when the urge arises in my gullet, and I choke it back. 'My observations and sequestral existence are so far-removed from anything called human that I should be hardly any more sensible than a preverbal child.' Some speak of the presence of a Divine Power - I have heard them before, at least, in a life before this one - but I have felt nothing like it to speak of. If this feeling of peace and well-being of which they speak is unattainable through action, why should one seek to attain it? Grace, as I know it, is given to me here on this windswept spit of an island.

Over the dunes are the other side. There is no discernible way around them. They stand, immovable and impassable, except overland. I have hiked, on my first arrival here, for hours and days, in one and both directions, with no progress toward any obvious end; there are miles, and miles only. The dunes are relatively easy to surmount; it takes about an hour of scrabbling upward, throwing the body at odd angles and pitches, occasionally grabbing onto scrub-grasses. The important thing is forward motion, continue ahead at all costs, or else the shifting sands and gravity simply draw any object tumbling down. Static inertia is not achievable for any body among the dunes, except the hardy scrub-grasses. I have imagined that were I to inhabit this part of the island, making upward progress as slowly as possible, perhaps at the rate of one step per day, I would be able to transmute and learn the secrets of the dusty, dry grasses, fasten myself tenaciously to the side of the dunes, and wilt, blowing away over time. There is no real desire to this kind of annihilation; simply going up the dunes is enough for me at this time. There is no particular satisfaction from achieving this goal, but the process of meeting an objective (or giving in, failing, tumbling harmlessly down the sandy incline) assuages the guilt of a worthless, priceless, powerless existence.

From atop the dunes I can see nothing new. A gaping blue pool surrounding me, the thin line of this land stretching to infinite distances. One night, I waited until the sun went down to watch the stars from here, and was given a spectacle like I have never witnessed. The sky was seemingly half-white with stars. As yet I haven't felt the need to repeat this show; it remains etched into my consciousness from here on out.

On the other side of the dunes it is the same as what I have come to feel is 'my side.' There are the same palms, coconuts, small scrub grasses and life, and it seems almost a mirror image of my side, so much so that I have never descended to the beach on the other side, so certain that I am that the water is the same water, the crabs the same crabs, and the wind the same wind.

I want for neither fire nor water, nor consort nor companion. My heart is at peace, beyond reception or sympathy. Bloodless, loveless, harmless, bodiless, devoid of even void, this whisper in my ear whispers no regret, no longing, only sibilant sighing.