Northerly

So there I stood, at the northernmost point of the island, and stared through the wreathing mist and the cold salt air. in such places, the briny vapour curls around you like a living thing. It is like being in the heartless belly of an aerostat; it is like being enveloped in something which fails to digest you only because it doesn't care.

At ten at night, the atmosphere was surreal; sharpened perceptions at very short range composed my universe. There were some lights, blurred to stars by the watery breeze. There were chill, hard, metal things which you could see and touch and feel; there was a sense of being on the edge of reality — which you could not see or touch or feel.

Things like this remind you of how tenuous, how faint, how inconsequential your grasp of logic and thought and the processes of mind can be. You know you are nothing and that any thoughts you have are possibly only self-confirming chemical impulses. These roil in a more concentrated chemical mass, one that is shielded from the more diffuse medium of your environment by a barrier of bone and thin membranes.

You are like a barnacle on a great whale. The moment of stillness engulfs you. If you could hang suspended in this space, and in this time, you would be as immortal as such a parasite.

But you cannot, and you are not.