The Whole Wide World

Seventy days of entries. I don’t know how I feel about that. It hasn’t been easy, but it has been a journey. It’s given me a responsibility that I didn’t fully understand when I initially committed to the project. There have been days were I thought I couldn’t do it. Days where I had nothing to say, but I found words and persevered. Days where I had all the things to say, but no energy to type the words. It’s not over either, which makes those last few sentences feel a bit premature. One more month of darkness.

I’ll still have two months left on the ice when I finish this writing project. Those two months will include the sun…and more people. The light brings the first flights of shoulder season which means new faces. They will have new energy, buzzing with the excitement of making it to the ice, to Antarctica. And I will have a year of ice life under my belt and a dark cold winter behind me. It will be interesting to see how those two states of being exist together in the overlap of time.

Change is coming. Days like today won’t be the norm anymore. It’s my day off at 5:30PM and I haven’t spoken to a soul aside from a single hello to the one and only person I passed when I ventured out of my room earlier today. I’ll still have my lazy day off during those two months, but they won’t be so quiet or so people sparse. With some light from the sun, I’ll be more inclined to go soak up the view from Hut Point and get that movement of body in, remembering the view that will soon be just a memory of my time down here.

It’s 5:30PM and I’ve just finished my last cup of coffee for the day. Oops. That’s what happens when you don’t start caffeinating until 1:30PM. I slept all morning. I don’t feel gross about it now, but I’ll probably be frustrated when it is late and I should be sleeping. It’s not like I am missing out on anything though, sleeping all morning like that. Almost the entire other 143 people on station have their day off of on Sunday, so it’s a nice alone day for me. Being in the store is a pretty social position, so I kind of relish the aloneness that my day off brings. A time of quiet when I recharge my batteries.