According to his journal, it took my husband six days to reach the island the first time. It took me somewhat longer. Because the rules had changed. Because the ground I found purchase on one day became the next uncertain, and at times seemed to fall away beneath me. Behind me at the lighthouse, a luminescence was growing in strength and a burnt haze had begun to dominate the sky, and through my binoculars for more days than should have been possible, there came the suggestion of something enormous rising from the sea in a continuous, slow-motion wave. Something I was not yet ready to see.

Ahead, the birds that shot through the sky trailed blurs of color that resembled other versions of themselves, that might have been hallucinations. The air seemed malleable, or like it could be convinced or coerced. I felt stuck in between, forever traveling, never arriving, so that soon I wanted a place to pretend was “base camp” for a while—a place that might quell the constant frustration of feeling that I couldn’t trust the landscape I traveled through, my only anchor the trail itself, which, although it became ever more overgrown and twisty, never faltered, never petered out into nothing.

If it had led me to a cliff, would I have stood there or would I have followed it over the edge? Or would that lack have been enough that I might have turned back and tried to find the door in the border? It’s difficult to predict what I might have done. The trajectories of my thoughts were scattered on that journey, twisted this way and that, like the swallows in the clear blue sky that, banking and circling back for a split second, would then return to their previous course, their fleeting digression a simple hunt for a speck of insect protein.

Nor do I know how much of these phenomena, these thoughts, I should attribute to the brightness within me. Some, but not all, based on everything that happened later, that is still happening. Just when I thought the brightness was one thing, it would become another. The fifth morning I rose from the grass and dirt and sand, the brightness had gathered to form a hushed second skin over me, that skin cracking from my opening eyes like the slightest, the briefest, touch of an impossibly thin layer of ice. I could hear the fracturing of its melting as if it came from miles and years away.

As the day progressed, the brightness manifested in my chest like a hot, red stone that pulsed next to my heart, unwelcome company. The scientist in me wanted to self-anesthetize and operate, remove the obstruction, even though I wasn’t a surgeon and the brightness no tumor. I remember thinking that I might be talking to the animals by the next morning. I might be rolling in the dirt, laughing hysterically under that merciless blue sky. Or I might find the brightness rising curious out of the top of my head, like a periscope—independent and lively, with nothing left beneath it but a husk.