Vortex, This and Now and—

This isn’t a lie: On August 26, 2024, aboard an Arctic ship surrounded by the late summer pack ice at 82° N, I discovered where wishes come true.

This is a lie: Leaving the known will always first require a leap.

This is a lie: The pack ice is a flat, unbroken plane I can walk across and find no end.

This isn’t a lie: The pack ice is an undone jigsaw. To every horizon, a hundred thousand bleached slabs, turquoise floes, and ashen bergs. All these ungrafted pieces eddy in one elaborate Arctic vortex. Our ship, too, drifts through the slow-motion whirlpool.

This is a lie: Summer here will be completely ice-free in five years; should we admit we’ve already passed certain points of saving our climate from collapse?

This isn’t a lie: Summer here will be completely ice-free much sooner; should we admit we deserve certain points of our own looming ecological annihilation?

This is and isn’t a lie: The number of days I’ve wished I were dead is greater than the number of days I haven’t.

This isn’t and is a lie: At 40, I’ve moved from Colorado to Germany. My major depression is resurfacing. My long-distance relationship is dissolving. My mother has pulmonary fibrosis and will die almost exactly a year from now. More than ever, what I want to find swirls together with what I’m escaping from.

This isn’t a lie: All day in the freezing rain, I sentinel from the ship’s bow. Other people occasionally join me on deck; it’s not long before they retreat inside. I stay, surrounded by cold living abyss. I can’t help feeling this is the closest I’ll ever come to learning what’s truest about myself. But crossing a psychic gap first requires me to cross a physical one.

This is a lie: The more I watch the pack’s ceaseless turns, the more I see its open invitation. The more I see, the less I trust what other people see. The less I trust others, the more I trust the unknown. The more I trust all things unknown, the less I care what is and what isn’t.

This isn’t a lie: Just before midnight, I steal away to the ship’s stern. Alone, I’m where I most want to be: forearms braced on the gunwale, eyes fastened north. We’re exiting the pack ice, forever. But I can stay. I don’t just want to slip quietly overboard. I crave sudden rise, a weightless hereafter, the last one thought: This and now. While the ship shrinks southward, I can go on leaping, from slab to slab, forever also.

This and now.

This is a lie: Before today, I planned to leap.

This is a lie: I’m this close—before a last glance down into the Arctic vortex tells me the sight of nature’s wild marvels will always be worth every single lived despair.

This isn’t a lie: Fast epiphany risks sounding like duct tape slapped across a crack in the ice—it holds true, until one day it doesn’t. If revelation will let me off the hook so easily, where should I stake all my trust: the ground we already know today or the abyss we could tomorrow?

This is a lie: I leap.

This isn’t a lie: When I tell you a lie, I’m also telling you a wish.

This is something else: When I tell you the truth, I’m also telling you what I left—