dizzy from spinning
Scrolling on the internet I stumbled upon this fun Kiribati fact and the second thing that crossed my mind was “How do I get there?”. The answer is quite obvious by looking at the map, “by plane, or by ship if you prefer the scenic route”.
It’s a bunch of endangered islands and atolls almost right in the middle of Pacific, far away from what you’d call “civilized world”. The highest natural landscape in the whole archipelago is a hill shy of 90 meters which means that by standing on top of it, you will see almost 30 km² of nothing but Pacific blue in every direction. Knowing the islands will most likely be underwater in the geologically-near future, seems like going there is something you want to consider sooner than later.
There you are, away from everyone that doesn’t matter. Walking on corpses of million-years old corals in the most farthest place you’ll ever be from home and can’t stop thinking about the chain of events that made all this possible and enjoyable. You picture an early Earth, raging and spitting fire, rivers of hot metal flowing all around while corals colonize it and “eat it alive” for millions of years, until this primordial hellscape turns into a pacific paradise where birds sing love songs and glasses are hairy and coconut-shaped. Sipping from the straw and laying on the beach, you picture yourself laying there for millions of years, staring at a constantly-evolving night sky while going full speed around that white Milky patch in the sky. And you can’t help but feel small and insignificant, living not more than a blink measured with the slow-ticking clock of the Universe. Time flies by and yet, it doesn’t. Time flies by, you remember being a child just like it was last year. But you see around and everything is static. Hundred years from now the fish will still be fish, the stars will still shine but you, once ambitious and vivid, you won’t.
And then you look on your left and you realize, maybe you’re a bit more significant than you might think. Among all those millions of years of daydreaming and changing landscapes, you could find one ugly-looking fish and call it your oldest grandpa, track it through time and evolution steps more complicated than a Japanese puzzle box, until you reach that night a couple of years back, witnessing your aimlessly roaming shell of a man accidentally catching exotic, blue butterflies by noticing the sweetest smile on Earth from across the room.
So you do what you have to do. You take her hand, walking barefoot on the sandy beach, and you go where imaginary line of equator meets the other imaginary line of antimeridian. You grab both her hands and start doing Titanic spinning scene right where both imaginary lines meet; laughing, dazed, swimming in oxytocin, until you both collapse on the ground. Forgetting there is a whole world around this island, you lock eyes and say — “You’re my North and South, my East and West, the only compass I need and the only direction I’m taking. I’d crawl there and kiss you if I weren’t still dizzy from spinning”.
PS: On further research, I found out that the equator meets the antimeridian somewhere in the sea, around 400 km from the closest coastline, and it kinda makes it hard recreating that Titanic scene on dry land, unless you wanna sleep with your ugly fish grandpa. But there’s still hope. The antimeridian, previously known as the International Date Line, goes through Siberia. Imagine having a day-long date on one side of the Date Line and at 23:59 you both cross the Line, going back by 24 hours and enjoying a weekend-long one-day date. Or I don’t know, do something to warm up. I hear it’s cold up there.