Suppose you were born on an island that’s in general inhospitable to human life. Somehow you managed to grow up despite the island throwing a multitude of gauntlets your way. Could you ever build a raft strong enough to carry you so far away that the island becomes a dot on the horizon? So far away that it’s possible to claim you were in fact not even born on that island?
Perhaps for a while, drifting upon the vast crests and troughs of water under a sky that unforgiving, you might even miss the island, but then when mainland appears and hope is rekindled, the island retreats into the folds of a horizon left behind. On the mainland, learning things anew, for once in your own way and at your own speed, you find a new life. It may not even be better, but it is enough that it is different.
Then when someone smiles and asks, “Where are you from?”
Do you lie? “I’m from a small village next to…”
Do you give a half-truth? “An island just off the coast of…”
Do you spill the truth? “An island no one has ever heard of, an island that hurt me as it raised me…”
The easiest and the expected thing to do is lie. Because most people don’t want the truth. It’s a part that everybody plays. So you smile and deliver your lines as you’re meant to.
At night, the island comes to visit: the burning sand, the mosquitoes, the animals, the snakes, but also amethyst sunsets, ocean breeze, foam-head waves, azure skies, sea gulls, susurrating palms…you yearn to forget the island. But you can’t. Night after night it rises from fathoms you didn’t even know you had. Slowly you begin to realise that the worst thing in the world isn’t that the island hasn’t left you, or that you can’t seem to leave it, the worst thing would be if it actually ceases to exist.
So the question really is, how do you outrun that which you need in the world, to make sense of it?
insearchofthebeautiful 