No Man Is An Island.

On vulnerability, and the longing to be seen.

May 11, 2025

We sleep naked with the windows open so the breeze can flurry our hair like trees on an island. Lazing, eyes-closed, we float like archipelagos. She’d always say, no man is an island. Yet my emotions can’t seem to swim. Don’t want to drown off the coast of some forgotten land, so I harbour my feelings beneath the swell. Perhaps she can sense them in the tides, these hidden cries, stuck inside this bed of rocks.

When I was a kid I used to think that if you went deep enough you could swim beneath a country. A flank of earth would lay hollow and hide another world. When I grew up, I realised my mistake. Countries are but surface etchings. People go much deeper. What they show on the outside is one part, what lays underneath is endless. People carry acres inside them. They carry them on the train to work everyday. They carry them to dinner. They carry them to bed. People, carry acres.

I was a quiet boy. Shy until you knew me. My disposition gave me a backseat. I could tag along without you knowing and that’d be alright. I could watch to see the acres slip in fleeting flashes of the eye. Until I saw a person free of any who almost seemed to fly. I swear, I saw it, so light, so free. Was she really like that, or did she hide her meadow beneath the cover of the sea?

‘Must get closer,’ is not so easy. For such a quiet boy. Using my voice was unfamiliar. Till one day, I did. I peered beyond to see she didn’t hide. She’d simply organised her acres in farmed formaldehyde. She’d pulled the weeds and tended the land until it almost glowed. Couldn’t believe she did such things—her hair, it had a bow.

I kept her image sharp for years inside my head. I’d even trace her silhouette across the written page. Described her curving bow like the bend that made us meet. This girl became a simulacrum, an auburn eyed mirage. I spent five hundred pages inside her endless mind, until she walked right up to me, and took me by surprise. I sat and listened to her, head against the glass, and watched with quiet eyes, her lack of compromise. She was who she appeared to be, that much was plain to see. Her acres carried her, or so it seemed to me.

We’d watch the desperation in eyes we thought we knew. In those who talk about football as a way to keep the score. That ball, it stabs the net like blood upon the grass. Rage from angry men that never could allow, their feelings and emotions, to slip beside the pitch. Their team, it won the game! They howled to cloak the pain.

I’d speak with them for hours, not once the subject shifts. Even in desperation, they still could not digress. Their fear of vulnerability, so hopelessly oppressed, these men, with cloak and daggers, that stabbed themselves to death. To me, it looked so sad, to see their eyes like cages, victims of their pride. Submission was too much to bear, too much, too rare—instead we saw it, plain and clear, the suffering in their stare.

I told her of my dream. The one about the countries, and swimming underneath. That if we dozed together, we’d float right underneath. She looked at me with auburn eyes, and flooded tears into the room. So big and full that half passed noon, rose tides just like the moon.

Unbeknownst to city dwellers, we float all afternoon. No man is an island, she’d say to make me swoon. We swam in search of borders, but found nothing of the sort, because lines on paper maps don’t show inside the sea. The notion of apart is taught, not what the eyes can see. Beneath the endless sky, you and I, are we.

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No Man Is An Island.

On vulnerability, and the longing to be seen.

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