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he sky is so big here, you say, stretching your arms wide as we wade through the tall grass at the base of the basalt cliffs. We are the only people in the park as it is getting on to midnight and still, despite the hour, I could call this dusk. We wend our way up to the beaten footpath lined with gorse—yellow bursting through the brush—as we are dissecting a situation, or a predicament, or an unmooring, and climb into the blue-grey of the not-quite-dark. As we walk the side of the hill, the dirt morphs into red-brown rocks and then boulders and we scramble over them hands, knees, and feet. We crest the peak and suddenly to the east: the sea. The horizon melts into the water's edge. Can't you see it? you ask, how everything around us is light? I nod against the roaring wind.

         But of course it is, it always has been, here at the top of the hill that was once a mountain. Underneath are the bones of an ancient volcano and the memory of the magma that made this place, a city crafted of light that seeped out from its center, eruptions of fire and mud. And maybe then the waning glow of our partnership, or our friendship, or our captain's ship—sunk below the brackish water of the bay—is still a secret buried here, sealed under the same stones that built this place, shapeless spectres simmering in wait. If all that light hides in darkness beneath our feet, I have seen only a sliver of the universe.

         I see it everywhere, I shout to you, too late. You are already descending. The wind is now a gale.