Tiny Island Life.

When I was 20, I lived on a tiny island in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea without a cell phone and with very spotty WiFi. I was too tall, too pale, and too organized to be allowed, yet there I was and there I unexpectedly thrived.

Everything was always a little broken. Once I tried to adjust the shower head and it broke off in my hand and that seemed perfectly normal. Which is why I just wedged it back on and feigned ignorance when it fell off onto my flatmate’s head the next week. Buses ran when they ran, and sometimes buses with six people would leave you on the curb and sometimes you nearly fell out of a bus going around a cliff as you hung on with dozens of your closest friends. I personally loved taking an escalator into the fancy grocery store in a mall, but I preferred to buy the cheap pink toilet paper from the corner store at the end of the street across from the pay phone I sometimes used to call home. In all the months I lived there I never did figured out when the Post Office was open. The best part of that semester was being three blocks from the sea and at 1:30 in the morning I could wander down to the rocks and stare into a crashing abyss. So much thinking, so little regard for safety.

I’ve been thinking about that semester a lot recently—the way I lived a completely different life without technology, connectivity, constant updates, or even a predictable schedule. 12 years ago the world was completely different. But more than that, the way I live has changed in uncomfortable and unfortunate ways. Pressure points and schedules, not experiences and adventure.

And yet, here we are in the middle of a pandemic, crisis, and terror, and I feel closer to that temporary life than I have in a long time. Maybe it’s just the goal, or maybe it’s living a more pliable life on a self-imposed island, or maybe it’s simply longing for a reminder that I didn’t need to be plugged into the universe in order to truly live. But maybe I just really miss living my life because maybe this is still just really hard.