It’s about 3 a.m. and I’m utterly exhausted. I’ve pushed myself to the brink for no good reason and I can barely keep my eyes open. I’m not entirely certain what I’m trying to prove here. I try a reconfiguration to see if it will make a difference, and I guess I’ve proven to myself what she knew all along once upon a time, that my attempts at fixing things end up being mere rearrangements. I don’t so much clean as reshuffle. Things move around, but nothing really changes.

The sea metaphor always comes easily, particularly in the deep dark night when I’m feeling lonely and abandoned. And I kind of wonder if this is what it’s like to be shipwrecked in the middle of nowhere, with no hope of rescue. You’re bobbing up and down on the waves like another piece of flotsam, just drifting. I imagine that even if you’re in the deep South Pacific, you’d start swimming. The chance of actually hitting land is virtually nil, but what else are you gonna do? Still, the thought of trying not to drown for days upon days—alone and with no one looking for you—just steals my breath like a punch in the gut. Trying to imagine that much continuous bleakness and emptiness is quite literally more than I can bear. The idea of never reaching shore is absolutely appalling. But that’s what I’m faced with: to keep swimming, although with every day, the chance of rescue comes ever closer to zero. The idea that I’ll ever touch dry land again before I die is becoming increasingly absurdly implausible, to the point of becoming utterly fantastic.