Three Islands Too Far (Daily Planet email #969)

I think I have gone three islands too far. Not literal islands, though the ripples suggest otherwise. Most of the time, people get in the car and travel without incident, other than the incident of arriving at their destination. Sometimes they would sing, people used to sing in the car, ideally for an audience of one. The radio wasn’t listening, its vector was external. Then they would stop at their destination, stop the singing and the traveling. Pass me two packets of sugar, please. Not literal sugar, though the sweetness would suggest otherwise.

The islands look like dots on the water, but as we now know through extensive testing and rigorous experimentation and some lucky guessing that the water is just too low to cover their land up; it is this way for the time being. For the time they are being, they are being islands, places on a map, on the oxygen breathers’ map. I could have stopped a few islands ago, but you know, frontier and all, it’s what makes the great balloons go up or drives innovation forward in hydration technology. It’s why our eyes face ahead. Can you imagine what we’d invent if our eyes faced the other way? Probably some sort of cushioning system, something to help with all the trip and falls. Antennas, perhaps, with a receiving vector. Two more sugars, thank you. No no, actual sugars this time. Mmm.

But why, why did I go? I could have stayed on, it was both warm and cold where those things were appropriate. There was fruit, and plants and birds and rocks and things. They probably could have dialed it back a bit on the sand, there really was a surfeit of sand. Gritty ol’ thing. But people knew me there, and mostly I knew people, except I never knew why they spoke to me. There were limits to the knowledge of course, skulls and laws and such. And most of the time I felt understood, even the corners I was seeing around, they knew what was up, which side of the dream was buttered upon. I didn’t have to make up a whole new language to describe it and hope I was wrong.

I followed the bird, but I don’t blame the bird. I tracked a family of red-rumped agouti, for hours it seemed until I didn’t know if I was hither or yon. Can’t blame them, either, it’s what they do. I followed the sun, but Lordy, she’s too fast for me, I had to rest, like, daily. I waited in the arcade alcove for you. Time passed, the mall closed, you know, the usual. No sugar for me, thanks. Do you find it difficult to keep all the past in your head? I waited in a time of islands for a time of no islands. Eventually even I wasn’t listening to me. Tragedy could strike at any minute — and it didn’t! …There would have been no point. Anyway, I had gone three islands too far.