today, i became an island*

on isolation as self-preservation

Lately, every day feels like revolution’s eve. The sun burns ruby with vows to restructure, reform, ruin. If the revolution had happened today, I would’ve been under a blanket, in my air-conditioned bedroom, quivering like a street dog.

Instead, the sky fell, collapsed under the weight of itself, and shattered into prismic sand. Everything went raven, slick and black, and I? Became an island.

The people are chattering about loneliness again, like it’s a new thing. Loneliness is as old as death and older than thrill (probably), but every few years we women write about it like a sin. Sometimes I feel it too, the brutal pang of involuntary seclusion, the unwelcome remembrance of aloneness. Other times though, it is solace. Few things offer more relief than crying into a pillow that smells like yourself.

We’re combating record-splintering levels of despair with dinner parties and book clubs. We’re showing up to the battlefield with squiggly scissors and good intentions. Do more bodies in a room muffle the crude cries of imminent doom? If we laugh together, can we drown the chronic buzz of the drones? Maybe.

This week, I watched as fireworks set the forest ablaze in twisted celebration in one place, while a storm ripped roofs from pink concrete homes in another. Destruction is omnipresent; there are tiny fires in the mountains as far as my subpar eyes can see.

But! Not on my island!

This morning, the wind whooshed through my right ear and out of my left, clearing my skull of worry and thought. The first thing I did was throw the phone into the sea. I pretend that the rivers, lakes, oceans aren’t choking on their own dust and flood my tomato plants with cool water. They are fat and sweet like me. I shape my lips to bellow I don’t care and relief streams down my chin like juice from a peach. If you’re looking for the bravery, it’s buried next to my head in the sand out back.

I can see movement across the water — somebodies maybe. But there is no room for anyone else here, not now. All anyone else ever does is remind me. (Of “what,” is unimportant.) Fugue is dainty and smells like the jasmine vines that snake around my fencepost. Naturally, I prefer that.

I plan an all-inclusive vacation to the place where the hurricane tore the roof off of some somebody’s home. It’s months out, and the shore should be cleared of corpses by then. If not, I will simply push it out to a later date; the birds must eat eventually.

There are no corpses on my island, but there are no mirrors, either. My hair takes it upon itself to curl into its favorite shapes and there is one less something for me to think about. When I pray, I say please because it sounds nice, but not thank you because I don’t mean it. When I sleep, my lashes quilt my eyes in plushy nescience, and when I dream, it is of the island.

The gulls scream me awake. There is blood on their beaks. One of them drops a piece of seaglass into my lap, heavy as a threat. I hold it up to the fresh light and can almost make out a new world.

*title references Coco Fusco’s exhibition, tomorrow, i will become an island