At low tide, the lagoon was far too shallow for the freighter to enter, so the only way to get myself to the island was to use my last fifty dollars to bribe the freighter's captain so that he would command a couple of his deckhands to lower a lifeboat and row me to shore, and the only way to get myself into that lifeboat was to crawl over the freighter’s side and climb down its cargo net.

     Heavy waves were rocking the freighter, and I was wearing a seventy-five-pound backpack containing my tent, a sleeping bag, freeze-dried food and cooking utensils, some fishing gear, an unopened ream of twenty-pound-bond typing paper, and nearly everything else I owned in the world except for a heavy manual typewriter that I was carrying separately in its metal case—the plastic handle of which I was clenching between my teeth.

     And if you should ever have the opportunity to descend a cargo net to reach a tiny skiff bouncing wildly on white-caps while you clench the plastic handle of a typewriter case between your teeth and with a seventy-five-pound backpack compromising your sense of balance, you may come to understand  just how tightly I was clutching that net as I attempted to decide whether my plan to live alone on a tiny, remote out-island was really such a great idea.

      I already suspected that the freighter's captain and his crew considered me unstable, but the plan was to eliminate all distractions and never to return to civilization again until I had written a heartbreakingly lovely and bestselling novel that would free me from everything sordid once and forever. Nevertheless, when my typewriter case unexpectedly unlatched and my heavy metal typewriter plunged into the sea, I also quickly needed to determine if I should continue to climb down the cargo net and be rowed to the island or simply climb back up the net and get back on the freighter. 

     And as I clung there, gripping the fibrous net with white-knuckled hands and watching my future disappear beneath the waves, my focus unexpectedly shifted, and it was as if something fixed had come loose inside me. The complicated and improbable patterning of crisscrossed rope suddenly seemed magnified and miraculous, and the individual threads from which the rope had been woven seemed even more amazing, and for the very briefest of moments I felt as if I'd finally been permitted to grasp whatever terrible indifference had been holding the entire universe together.

Michael Colonnese is the author of Sex and Death, I Suppose, a hard-boiled detective novel with a soft Jungian underbelly, and of two prize-winning poetry collections, Temporary Agency and Double Feature. He lives in the mountains of western North Carolina, near Asheville.