Part VI
Nerves were shot, no one trusted each other.
The people who had been to the shack didn’t trust themselves. I didn’t trust anything I was seeing.
“Maybe we were going crazy.” I postulated to myself in my camera. This was met with jeers from someone in another room. “Of course you’re crazy.”
A few more weeks passed and eventually we integrated back into the group in a more productive way, but there was a rift that didn’t seem to be fixable.
People started separating themselves off into rooms now, as the entire place could actually house us safely. It appeared we may be here for the long haul so we began to claim space as our own.
They had also apparently found mattresses stacked up in the far part of attic and the beds were remade. This felt like some kind of miracle.
I wondered when food would start to run out.
Were there even animals to hunt? There were some bows and arrows down in the basement but I certainly didn’t know how to use one. I thought to make it a point to learn.
I made a few friends that I’d actually consider close, two people especially, that had been on the island with me. We worked on most projects together. Everyone seemed to be grouping or even pairing off. It felt like a real community, eerily similar to those I’d imagined hoping to live in when I was young. Of course I hadn’t planned to be forced into that, and I couldn’t imagine myself purposefully moving somewhere cold, much less this cold.
Beds aside, sleep was impossible for me. I couldn’t stop thinking about reality and our nature. I tend to slip into severe solipsism in times of trauma, so I started to worry that there was some kind of remission I was unaware of. We were told that we were gone for months, and that was (for us) on top of the months we had already been there.
Half a year. Does winter end here?
I heard a faint howling.