I have no clear idea of how long I have been here. I should have kept track. Don’t all trapped island men keep a calendar? Didn’t Crusoe? Did Prospero? But why should I? Wouldn’t it be better if I could forget time? Wouldn’t that be the great benefit of it all?

“Isn’t that what I keep hoping for?” I said to Benedictus.

And he said to me, “This is paradise but that the past and the future continue to frame your thinking.” And so where would a calendar fit in?

“You don’t need language any more than time,” he told me but by then we were taking off our clothes and walking into the cove. The water wasn’t muddy as it is now, it was clear and warm, without the layer of cold so it must have been summer.

[…]

You need to blow out to breath in, so you start to blow on the way up so when you get to the surface you’re ready for a deep breath and you trick the voice in your throat who thinks that you’ve already started to breath and he leaves you alone in a plume of bubbles the current carries barely off to the side.

When I’m just a head floating on the water above the reef I call Parrot Fish Reef I look at the island and think my hell could be paradise. If I could just be here and nowhere else.

~ Dennis Phillips, from Hope