You know what's funny about this place, she said to the river, to the grass, to the lavender sky doing its lavender thing above her like it had nowhere else to be — you know what's actually funny about Regret Island is that it doesn't ask anything of you. Most places ask something. Most places have an agenda, a current pulling you somewhere, a thing they need you to be before they'll let you stay. Kelper-9 needed people to run it. Her homeworld needed bodies to fill the violence quota. The void needs nothing from you but it gives nothing back either, which is its own kind of demand, the demand of pure indifference, and you'd think that would be restful but it isn't, it turns out, it turns out pure indifference is just loneliness with better acoustics.
But this place. This stupid golden place with its crystal river and its pollen clouds and its grazers that flicker like they can't decide what color they are and its one specific flat rock upstream where you can sit with your legs over the water and feel the current around your ankles like it's checking in on you. This place just — lets you be here. No agenda. No current. Just here.
She pressed her palm flat against the grass.
The grass was warm. Warmer than the sun accounted for, if you were paying attention. Warmer than it had been last week, if you were keeping track. The fruit near her feet was sweeter than it used to be and the air moved with a particular softness that hadn't always been there and the light fell at an angle that was — kind, there was no other word for it, the light was being kind to her specifically and she knew why and she was choosing not to look directly at it the way you choose not to look directly at something you're not ready to see yet.
I know, she said to the island. I know. I'm not doing it on purpose.
The island didn't answer. The island just kept being perfect.
Which was the answer.
Here's the thing about Tiger, she said, to the space where Tiger wasn't, to the flat rock upstream where he was probably sitting right now eating fruit with his hand in his pocket looking at the middle distance and filing things — here's the thing about Tiger that I don't think Tiger knows about Tiger, which is that the detachment he described, the absence of pull, the stopping reaching because the thing is never there when the hand arrives — that's not the whole story. That's the story he tells. I've heard the real story. I've seen the shape of it from very far away across a very long time and the shape of it is not detachment, the shape of it is someone who reached for something and the thing was there, it was there, and then something happened at the research outpost or before or after and the reaching stopped not because the thing was never there but because it was there and then it wasn't and the gap between those two states was apparently large enough to build a philosophy around.
She paused.
I'm not going to tell him that, she said. Obviously. For reasons.
The river moved. A grazer somewhere in the distance made its low resonant sound and then didn't make it again.
Lily, she said. Lily is — easier to describe and harder to understand simultaneously, which is a trick very few people manage. You can describe Lily in ten words. Loud. Absurdist. Names things. Builds meaning. Chooses beauty as an act of aggression. Those ten words are accurate and they tell you nothing because the thing about Lily that the ten words miss is that Lily chose all of those things. Consciously. At some point in some cycle she looked at what the universe was and what it wasn't and she decided who she was going to be in response to it and she has been that person ever since with a commitment that is — I don't have a word for it in any language. I know a lot of languages. I've heard most of them born and I've watched most of them die and none of them have a word for the specific quality of someone who decided to be themselves on purpose and never looked back.
She pulled her knees up.
I like them, she said, and the saying of it out loud to nobody made it more real than it had been when she was just knowing it. I like them specifically. Not in the general way, not in the way you like the concept of mortals when you've been watching them long enough, not the fond distant affection of something very large for something very small — I like them the way you like people you've sat next to at a campfire. The way you like people who give you fruit when you've had a bad game of chamov and call it a reward. The way you like people who punch someone for calling your bird ugly and mean it. The way you like people who say things in languages you don't share in the middle of waterfall pools because they wanted to hear what their own voice sounded like.
She looked at her hands.
The hands that had turned George into a mangled corpse without deciding to.
The hands that had erased a charging predator while laughing at a joke without registering that she'd done it until it was already done.
The hands that knew how to do things she didn't ask them to do anymore because she'd stopped asking them not to.
She closed them.
Here's the thing, she said to the island, to the grass that was too warm, to the light that was being too kind, here's the thing that I keep not saying to myself which is that I came here for a reason and the reason was not fruit and it was not chamov in the trees and it was not George and it was not the word game or the pose game or the feeling game or the way Tiger almost smiled that one time at the waterfall or the way Lily speaks Kalar like the language is something she's been keeping warm for the right occasion — the reason was something else and I have been here long enough that I can't fully remember what the reason felt like from the inside anymore and that should probably concern me more than it does.
The island gave her a small breeze. Warm. Perfectly calibrated.
I know, she said again. I know what you're doing. Stop.
The breeze continued.
She looked at the river. At the pollen clouds drifting in patterns that made slightly more sense from where she was sitting than they would from anywhere else on the island. At the lavender sky deepening toward evening above the treeline.
She thought about Lily's speech on the cliff edge. Fun is the anyway. Fun is looking at all of it and going anyway. She thought about Tiger's hundred words on detachment, so short and so complete, the whole shape of a person in a paragraph. She thought about George, sitting in Lily's lap being formally apologized to. She thought about the chamov board in the hollow of the tree, left by someone who knew what they were leaving.
She thought about hala bafka and what it meant and how she had heard it and said nothing and was still saying nothing and was going to keep saying nothing because there was no version of saying something that didn't end with her standing here saying what she was.
What she was.
She hadn't said it to herself in weeks. The name. She'd been Lynn so thoroughly and so continuously that the other thing had started to feel like a description of someone else. Someone she used to be. Someone who existed before Regret Island and the river and the fruit that tasted like the good kind of regret and two people who didn't ask her to be anything other than wet and awkward and unable to land a punchline.
She almost said it now.
The name.
Almost.
The island tilted slightly toward her, the way it had been tilting for weeks now, the way she'd been pretending not to notice, the light gathering around where she sat with the gentle insistence of something that wanted her to be alright.
She looked at all of it.
The river. The grass. The sky. The golden perfect effortless warmth of a place that had no reason to love her and was doing it anyway.
I'm feeling so tired, she said.
The island made itself more beautiful.
It didn't help at all.