Island. Let me think of you, in me.

I lie here on the sand at Desolation Cove. Noddies and petrels circle; I wonder at my madness. To have left the island—or to choose, this time, to stay. Some deeply buried prejudice from my upbringing, from my childhood, tells me I must attempt to return to society, even if it means my death; the island whispers to me of a life beyond death, and of the eternal beauty of the present. We have no words in our language for this knowledge of a life outside time.

I am afraid that if I returned to that other world I would lose the beauty and the meaning of this life. How could I explain to anyone what it means, if I have no words?

Who would listen to an old woman?

But by staying here, there is no old woman. There are no wrinkles, no lines, no sad wasting of the flesh. No judgment, no pity, no indifference.

I see only a sentient being in a body touched with the grace of belonging.

The sun beats on my skin and the heat is terrible, but the wind lays a cool hand upon me, the caress of a lover. If it rains, I am soaked through and cold; then the sun returns, to warm me this time like a welcome fire, and the cycle is complete.

The elements are my lover. I press my body into the sand.

Sometimes I touch myself as lovers touched me. It is a gift in my body to know pleasure, but a sadness to know it alone. Sometimes the pleasure comes to me in sleep and then I awake with a sweet well-being: my body has sung on its own, without the stern choirmaster of the mind’s desire.

The mind has not always been so easily contented. There were long hours, days, of boredom when we first came to the island. I had to play games, with Fred: tick-tack-toe in the sand, chess with primitive hand-made figurines. Later, I had to make up my own solitary games. To pass the time.

One day I understood, after Kuma had gone and I lay watching the passing of clouds, that to “pass” the time is wrong; a terrible ailment once afflicted me, still afflicts, perhaps, those among whom I once lived. I wanted to skip over time until something took me away from myself (a radio broadcast from the President, a play at the theater, a night in company). That was wrong because I deprived myself of the present, when I should have been watching the clouds, or thinking about the watching of clouds.

There is no word for my state of grace on the island: we invented the word for time, and in so doing, invented time itself and lost that state of grace.

Animals sit quietly in the sun, under the large sky. They watch, they feel, in their way they think, with their other sense of which we know so little. They are better adapted to the present; one wonders if they know of past or future.

I learn to sit like an animal, my pores open to the necessity of life. The earth smells ripe and rich of existence.

I have my memories, too. I lie in the sand or on my pallet and they come to me, changing cumulus on the sky of the past.

In dreams memories are transformed and become reality. If I cannot touch those visions with my meddling thoughts, if my sleeping mind and body perceive them as reality, then surely that makes them so. Thus I am still able to fly. And to crash-land upon awakening.

At times the pain of wakefulness is great, with the sharpness of memories, sleeping lions, disturbed. Then I must fight for forgetfulness and serenity in the beauty of the present. I go into the lagoon and release my pain to the cerulean hues of its depths; I lie undisturbed on the glass-smooth water. Even the sharks fear the sharpness of my pain.

The ocean brings me its gifts. Not just the shells, the driftwood, the fine-ground colored pieces of glass; it also brings me the detritus of civilization. I wonder that man has produced so much, that his castoffs can travel to me, almost daily, on my remote island, and he cannot.

Bottles, cans, containers printed with Japanese characters, drawers with handles (whose hands?); huge salt-ravaged lengths of timber; jagged, rusty sides of metal; shiny bags made of a strange stretchy material. Tokens of a world I do not know.

Once I found a huge conch shell, big and pink as a melon. I listened: in it I heard, not the sea, but the drone of propellers.