"A View of Solheimar: a Re-Imagining"

Day 72-

It’s getting colder.  It’s getting darker.  I wake up after seemingly hours and hours of sleep to find out I don’t know whether it’s day or night.  Eight hours go by, it’s still dark, two more hours, getting lighter, and by mid day we find ourselves entrenched in what barely passes as daylight.  I wake up hungry, but there is no time to feed.  We have to meet.  So instead, we walk.  We make our way, through the dark, not knowing if we are going the right way.  Most mornings are brisk and dark, but we have no choice.  Finally, we see the building where we have to meet.  The people seem to appear from nowhere.  No one knows why, but they do it every morning; even we don’t know why we do it with them.  We hold the hands of people we barely know, they speak in a harsh, otherworldly tongue, which we have no ability to understand, and at the end they pass something off as singing.  The only piece that keeps us coming back is the opportunity to find out what is for the mid-day feed.  The rest of the day seems to pass in less and less time.  It is as though we are waiting for the darkness to return.  Perhaps something is empowering about the darkness, a false sense of freedom.  Today the darkness came even earlier, and we were simultaneously shrouded in a veil of snow.  The beauty is the way this land of ice can be so tremendously terrifying and remarkably gorgeous concurrently.  The chance of being suffocated by ash from an erupting volcano is ever present, or perhaps being devoured by the lava itself; there is the ever-existent feeling of being frozen in time by this land’s power, as though we have no control.  Yet day after day, we overcome, and do it all again.