Matt’s smile dropped. He looked around and saw that the spell had been broken for every other member of the group. No one could meet Matt’s eyes. Suddenly the cabin seemed too small, as if cramming them all together only exacerbated their indifference. He stood up and grabbed a can of his own, angry, but trying not to show it. “It’s what brought us all together.”

Tim put a hand on his shoulder. “It wasn’t really. Remember we were all on that boat, but we didn’t know each other really, not at the time.”

“No one else remembers how it felt? Like life was so much more than we thought? Like human beings were capable of so much more than we thought? It was like riding a bike without stabilizers the first time. It was...”

“Matt,” Robert interrupted, “I appreciate the irony of what I’m about to say, seeing as I’m studying literary fiction, but you don’t have to drown everything in mysticism to make it seem more than it really was. We thought the tunnel was cool and then we became friends and we decided to make an annual pact. That’s it. The tunnel is a tunnel. It’s not alive. It’s not a portal. It’s not something that can provide a springboard for cosmic ideology. There was a hill. Humans decided they needed to go through the hill. So they did. It’s very cool, but it’s just a tunnel.”

Matt looked around to see the others wordlessly nod in agreement. He’d never felt so segmented, so cut off from the rest of them. “If you all thought that, why did you all come back here?”

They all remained quiet and looked to Tim, as if they were waiting for their leader to speak. Reluctantly, he did, putting a hand on Matt’s shoulder. “We didn’t come back here for the tunnel.”

Suddenly, Matt felt upset, incredibly so. He flung his hands up in the air, spilling about a quarter of his beer, and shrugged off Tim. “Then I don’t know what you did come back here for, because it certainly wasn’t me.” He pushed past Tim and went to the door, expecting someone to stop him, say, No, it was you, silly. We came back for you! But no one did. He turned to look at them all again sadly.

“We should get going,” he muttered. And went outside.

The motor started up quickly, spluttering slightly as if shrugging off a few months of slumber. Matt cast off on his own, knowing what he was doing, even though it was better done with two people. No one came out to help him. He felt like he was on the boat alone.