Fluke

21: Self-Care, Don't Care

Jia.

Well, it was nice while it lasted.

I scooted off the couch with my laptop and sat on the floor right next to it. A low battery notification popped up on the screen, but I closed out of it and flipped back to my whale program, which, like always, struggled to load.

She continued into the living room, and when she saw the glow of my computer, she let out a huff.

"Have you been awake all night working?" she asked.

I shook my head, which technically wasn't a lie. Out of all the half-truths and white lies I had told in my life, that was one of the first to protect myself and my reputation rather than spare someone's feelings.

"Did you sleep, or are you just caffeinated?"

I looked up from the screen that had no work on it. "Mostly caffeinated, but I'll be fine."

"Don't you have another whale run today?"

"Yep. I'll sleep on the boat."

She shook her head. "Am I the only one who values sanity here?"

"Darrell claims that he does, but there's no evidence to support that whatsoever."

Jia laughed. "At this point, I'm just treating everything he says as a joke. I can't even deal with him otherwise." She hesitated for a moment. "Oh, fuck, is that Logan sleeping?"

"Uh," I began, but before I could come up with an explanation that didn't seem suspicious, Jia spoke once again.

"We should probably leave him alone. You wanna chat outside?"

I let out a breath. "Yeah, sure."

There were a million logical explanations why he'd be right there, but my panicked brain couldn't think of a single one. Fortunately, Jia didn't ask questions and came to a rational conclusion herself, or at least I hoped that was the case.

I pulled on a pair of shoes and a jacket before heading outside, but while I usually went straight for the watchtower or the shoreline, Jia lead me up the spiraling steps to the top of the lighthouse. It rose higher into the air than the watchtower, and the view from atop the lighthouse reached farther than from any other point on the rock.

A chilly wind whipped through my hair, and although we stood right next to the foghorn, the gulls had piped down to a dull, squawking roar as most of them slept.

"Sometimes I just like to wake up and get away from everyone here," Jia finally said. "No offense, but these crazy circumstances kind of take a toll on me."

I smiled. "That's not unreasonable at all. I'd probably lose my mind if I didn't get to go on my whale expeditions."

The wind dragged a layer of fog across the surface of the ocean, and unless it dissipated before dawn, I'd be stuck with data more difficult to read than normal.

"We're all crazy, but can you blame us? I haven't taken a real shower in weeks, not even to get the bird shit out of my hair. Logan spends two hours a day just counting seals. Brett has nothing to do but cook. Carter locks himself away from everyone else, so he can focus. You practically kill yourself over these whales, and you get nothing in return," Jia said.

"It's not pretty, but I think we really do get stuff in return. We get a little closer to understanding, and we get a little closer to everyone else caring just as much as we do."

"Let me know when you find someone enthusiastic about copepods and diatoms."

"Carter exists, so there's bound to be more just like him," I said.

"I just wish we had a bigger sphere of influence, you know? Even just let a few students from the school come out here to check it out. Maybe it'd feel a little less isolated." She sighed. "A little less out of the loop."

I nodded. "You could ask Toby."

"Maybe I will. I think it'd be good for literally everyone here, especially Darrell."

"Anyway, I don't think we're alone out here. There are whales, birds, seals, flytraps, and plankton. There's even a small part of me that wants to believe this isn't completely real, that it's an experiment that the psychology and sociology majors are running on us."

"I wouldn't doubt it," Jia said with a laugh. "There's some fucked up people in psych."

"I'm sure they'd say the same about us."

Jia laughed. "You're probably not wrong."

Neither one of us spoke for a moment, and I looked down at the shoreline, where the tide should have just begun to roll in with each crashing wave. But there wasn't too much to see beyond the rocks, since a blanket of fog obscured the rest of the world, which served as the only reminder that civilization didn't start and end at Paradise City.

I knew the limited watchtower view to the point that some of the magic had disappeared for me, but the lighthouse had a full view of the entire island, even if I couldn't see too much in the moonlight just off the coast.

Every day was a good day for data collection, but some days were better than others.

"Are you fluent in gull yet?" I finally asked.

"Eh, I'm conversational. The aggressive squawks generally mean don't fuck with me, and when they shit on you, they don't like you that much. Nothing I couldn't figure out with common sense," Jia said, then shook her head. "Oh, and the high-pitched ones mean feed me, slacker parents, or I'm calling child protective services."

I laughed. "They seem to have an organized society."

"You'd be surprised. They're a lot smarter than I thought they were. They're vocal, yeah, but it's with good reason most of the time."

Most of the time.

They were a lot better than humans in that regard, who liked to talk just to talk.

"Just make sure that you don't work all night on identifying the whales tonight, okay? You can accomplish a lot in a day and still take care of yourself," Jia said.

I smiled. "I've been taking care of myself for a while now."

"Doing the bare minimum to stay alive isn't taking care of yourself."

The wind flipped her hair over to the other side of her head, but she left it like that. I tightened my loose-fitting jacket around myself.

Human interaction. Homo sapiens, an incredibly social animal, thrived on it. Dopamine, serotonin, and sanity all depended on it. Although I couldn't definitively say that my improved happiness was from the people or the whales, perhaps there was more value to the social aspects of life than I originally thought.

I had four friends who had to deal with me whether they liked it or not since we were all stuck together far away from anyone else. And Darrell wasn't included in that count for obvious reasons.

I smiled to myself. "I think I'm doing a little better with that."

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Hi everyone! Thank you so much for reading! I'm sorry this is a little late, but life does that sometimes. I just got a new job, but it's pretty chill, actually. I'm a writing tutor and receptionist for my university now, but I pretty much have the people skills of Reagan, so we'll see how it goes. Hopefully I can actually write during my work hours. That sounds bad, but it's okay. I promise.

I didn't really proofread or edit this chapter at all, so if you see anything, you know the drill. Let me know.

So for today's question, do you think you'd be able to handle Paradise City?