There are two quests for our species: that of stranger tides through the stars, and that of gold through raging rivers. It is as though we are looking for something beyond ourselves. Does that make us fools or visionaries?

Reshaping old ideas to find contentment like a line drawn thicker to conceal a shaking hand’s work. Or truths refuted by a stubborn ego. Or shipwrecks bent to fit an imaginary self. A perpetual state of affliction convinces us we are more alive than yesterday. There is agony in all that is real.

One must welcome the jealousy when facing the exquisite blindness of those at peace, of those who enter haunted houses saying, “We know you are there, we are not afraid”. Bliss and conscience wedded in depths condoned. All is well.

Venture too deep and be deprived of vision. Are we fearful of the dark or of what we cannot see? The latter reveals we are oceans: diving into oneself is too painful, so we buy books we will never read. We must store our omissions on shelves, without the ones that stand between who we are and who we could be. Maybe our dread is to see confirmed what we already realize.

I seek to disregard the extremes at the bounds of human life.

If I run far enough, I might elude the echoes of the doubtful crying out, “The faster you rise, the harder you fall”. My father used to tell me a story about a boy who reached for the Sun, I forget his name, but it is tattooed on my fatal endeavours. If I do not fly, I will sink.

Each leap year, more sinister, the ache oozes, trickles. Age. And the toll of error. Success cannot be baked. Contentment is not built in a toolshed. No cookbooks, no screwdrivers, no factories, no needle and thread. Life is hardly in their hands. Mine is fleeting, nil. Floods have never brought me renewal.

Again, rolls up to me the dusk doubt, the meaning lacking. The absurd is a subscription service, and I live in a corn maze. Dry. Would burn in seconds. None to recall the ways of early days, extinguishers and hydrants are foreign and mythical.

So is the cost of being borne by the gravity of a star unescapable. At night, I turn my back to the moonlight and contemplate the ghostly hues of my skin, indigo. Suffocated. I am a prey to the gap between hostilities, and in nightmares, but a loud screech in a vacuum – cruelty in the name of the Universe and all that spirals. Then, the faint rumble of the end of the world, and the past like a glitch, stuck like dirt under fingernails. It always comes back.

There is an end. There is an end. There is an end.

Walking the coast of Florida, I encounter a young man wrestling with a map, searching for an island that has been claimed hundreds of times, asking more questions about himself than about the sea.

Is there meaning to be found in such reveries?

I tell him

maybe Atlantis is a place within.