Six days on an island with one road, four hundred residents, and a generator that goes off at eleven. I had intended to stay two nights.
The first two days
Difficult, and I want to be honest about that because the version of this story where I arrive and immediately decompress is not what happened. For roughly forty-eight hours I was bored in a way that felt physical. I checked a phone with no signal maybe thirty times. I read badly, skimming, unable to settle.
Nobody writes about this part. The withdrawal is real and it takes about two days.
Then something switches
On the third morning I read for four hours without looking up. I have not done that since I was about nineteen. The book was not remarkable. The capacity was.
After that the days took a shape without my arranging one: swim, read, eat, walk the road to the north end and back, read, eat, sleep when the generator went. I did not decide this. It assembled itself out of what was available, which is what happens when the available options are few enough to see all at once.
What I am careful about
Not turning four hundred people’s home into a metaphor for my attention span. The island is not a retreat centre; it is a place where people fish and run shops and have opinions about the ferry contract, and my six days of restorative boredom are entirely beside the point of it.
I paid for a room, ate at three places, and left. That is the extent of what I am owed by it and the extent of what I can say about it.