I had found the end of the world. Not an end in time, an end in… distance. Perhaps I could better elaborate this as the edge of the world. Now please, let me assure you, I was never a flat-earther or anything of the sort. I’d subscribed blindly to countless streaming services but I’d never subscribed to the idea that we lived on a flying disk, or on a flat surface in a dome like a big snow globe, or to any other idea that made limited scientific sense.
If I’d been labeled as anything I guess it would’ve been as a “round-earther” Was that something? I’d always known the earth to be round, circling the sun, spinning around, giving us days and nights and seasons. I’d always known that, and I’d still known that even through the present moment. But I didn’t know what to tell you as I was standing here at the edge.
I followed the maps and the globes that countless cartographers had crafted and I kept coming back to the same inconsistency. The same little spot that just didn’t make any sense. A rift? A tear? The coordinates and the distances didn’t line up with the lines of latitude and longitude on the maps. Well, they did line up nearly everywhere, just not in this one little spot. One little corner of the earth. With cold cousins to the south, sun-kissed sheilas to the northwest. It didn’t add up.
And so, I traveled here. Took a couple planes, a car, a bike that traveled where the cars couldn’t, and then a boat where the bikes couldn’t. The boat took me to solid ground, a scooter took me across the uncharted island, and another boat took me out across vast waters the next morning. And then I reached the next island. Uncharted? Absolutely. Even those that knew of uncharted islands didn’t know about this one. Was it even an island or was it just a long strip of rock? A long strip of rock with bits of grass and tall plants that were so tall you wouldn’t call them plants but were too short and not sturdy enough to be called trees. The man in the boat left me, muttering nervous words in another language and shaking his head at me. He looked positively fearful of something, the island, my desire to come here, or maybe that other thing… the thing you’d only see if you looked straight into my eyes while sitting next to me.
This was a place my Sheila would have loved. Yeah, Sheila. Her actual name. Undiscovered places, untapped by human greed and overindulgence. That’s what she loved. Not much of that left. Damn near zero of it left. And I finally found a wrinkle of beauty on the “surgerized” face of the earth. A piece of skin on Mother Nature’s face that was allowed to be left alone, left to age with grace while the rest was plastered with plastic and injected with synthetic materials to give the illusion of a beauty that wasn’t true but just perceived by the rich and crammed down our throats until we accepted it.
Oh, how Sheila would’ve loved it here, even in its minuscule nature, it was a marvel. I guessed it was just four hundred feet wide, if this was indeed the width that I was looking at and not the length. I guess it all depended on your perspective. It was the width to me because I was facing one direction and the direction I was referencing was stretching to my left and right. The direction I was facing, that extended much farther. The length. For me, anyway. It all had to do with perspective. Everything did. Sheila taught me that when I thought I was doing something for us, but she made it clear it was just for me. I learned it when she left. I refused to accept it while she was gone. When I saw her again it dawned on me that I didn’t need to accept it, it was true whether my dim-witted brain pieced it together or not. The world was not waiting on me to declare something as the truth before it made it so. The truth was the truth. Get on board or not, that ship was sailing off into the waters. No one gave a shit if you were glued to the dock.
And that was when I finally did accept it. And then I did everything in my power to get her back. A year without her was too long. Another year of changing my habits and altering myself into a more positive version of myself was also too long, but it was necessary. And it worked. It got me Sheila back, just in time for the diagnosis, and that cliche statement from the doctor. “You have three months. Maybe four.”
Try two months, doc. And also, try fucking yourself. That’s right, I was shooting the goddamn messenger. Because the recipient died. And now there was no one to blame but you… and myself for letting so much time slip away. The moments played over and over in my mind that I hadn’t realized I’d traveled a couple thousand feet of this narrow, through my perception, strip of land. And I’d reached the end. The edge. Fitting. I’d already reached my edge. My end. Why shouldn’t I be standing at the edge of the world?
The jetty stuck out over the water, around one hundred feet of it straight as a board, yet dangling precariously. I was just twenty feet past the point that this jetty extended from the earth. It felt sturdy, but when something juts out off of the planet and extends into, I didn’t know what to call this, was it technically space? Well, yeah, that thing would feel quite delicate in that situation, wouldn’t you think? I had been so preoccupied I hadn’t realized the sky getting darker, but it was evening in this part of the world so that was expected. But the sky darkened more rapidly than I’d ever experienced, I just forgot to be aware of it. The water surrounding this narrow island was rushing even louder but I wasn’t paying it any mind because the sound of rushing water had always comforted me. At that moment, I realized it sounded like a waterfall. And when I looked down beneath me, I realized, waterfall may not have been the perfect geographic term for what this was, but the perfect term likely didn’t exist, so waterfall was going to be the closest term to apply here.
The ocean had surrounded me on the right and left, and the narrow island had narrowed even more at this point, twenty feet wide, like a big rock diving board. Perhaps I was seeing the curvature of the earth beneath me as the water bent and sloped downward, but as I peered past my feet, past the rock jetty below me, I couldn’t see a curving body of water. I just saw the water heading straight down, flowing with ferocity and falling through the sky to an unknown destination. I kept walking along, approaching the end of the diving board, all around me a navy-blue sky and twinkling white dots that were brighter and bigger than I’d ever witnessed. I didn’t know what the flat-earthers thought the actual edges of their proposed flat earth looked like, I didn’t know if they expected it to be an abrupt end of the land, like a cliff that Wile E. Coyote was about to run over, but it wasn’t that. It was the ocean . . . just dropping . . . like an endless waterfall. Waterfalls usually fall into what? A lagoon? Some sort of . . . pond? I wouldn’t know, I’m not a geographer or a geography teacher or a . . . well, what other profession does a geography major dive into? It didn’t matter, I was none of those things. But my limited knowledge told me that a waterfall cascaded and landed into some body of water. But this waterfall, again that was a bad term, maybe I’d ingratiate myself into the geography community and invent a new term, “oceanfall”? Sure, this “oceanfall” wasn’t falling into a body of water, not one I could see anyway. It was falling into darkness. If there was a body of water it was falling into, it had to be miles down.
I still didn’t want to believe those “Flatties” were right, and they couldn’t have been. But what would you call this diving board hanging off the side of the earth that I had finally reached the very edge of? Where was it trying to lead to? Did it have a purpose? Or was it like everything else in this world? Was it lacking any point at all, just existing, waiting to succumb to the darkness that always lurked beneath it?
Probably.
Why not join in on the fun?
I was never a world-class diver, but I was often regarded as the best diver at the community pool in the neighborhood I lived in from ages eight to fourteen. And so, I hiked up my trunks, straightened out my spine, and dove with exquisite form. I imagined when people leapt from buildings and other tall objects they probably jumped out, feet first, or maybe just in a falling forward motion. There probably weren’t a lot of divers or cannonballers. That would be a unique way to go out at the very least, and I’d have that to add to my resume then, I suppose. Right at the very end of the resume . . . near the end . . . right before special talents. I always wrote juggling in that section.
I couldn’t juggle.
Who could juggle all the emotions of this day and age? It was so much easier to just leap away from them. And many have said, sometimes doing what’s right isn’t the same as doing what’s easiest. And that was true. But you also must remember, doing what’s easiest . . . it was always easiest . . . always so easy! So, if you wanted ease in your life, give up. Right? Maybe doing the right thing wasn’t for everyone, maybe for some of us, doing the easiest thing was the best we could do. What was left for me here anyway? Sheila was gone, and in a way that offered me no closure. I knew what people thought when I said that too, but they didn’t know the half of it. They didn’t know the seven-eighths of it. The news she’d be leaving me was terrible, yes, but then she wanted to go off and be alone. I saw her falling apart, I saw her eyes drooping, I saw the blood constantly expelling from her coughing mouth. And she didn’t want me to see her like that. So, she vanished.
I knew she was gone, but I didn’t get to see the very end. She did what my cat did when I was ten years old, crawled under the deck and died . . . alone. It was so sad, I didn’t know how to process it, and I wished she could’ve been comforted in the very last seconds of it all, but instead she was absolutely alone in the dirty shadows underneath the steps. And I missed her instantly, but I was ten, and I also wanted to get back to my TV show. And I didn’t stay there and pay my respects like I should have because I was a ten-year-old who was still self-absorbed. I think of that one every so often, it comes up maybe once a month, how I didn’t pay Frisky her respects, and so I try to do it once a month when I think of her. At least I saw her body. At least I was offered a sliver of closure. With Sheila, I just lost her, twice. And then she wasn’t anywhere for me to see her anymore.
As I careened downwards and listened to that relaxing roar of the oceanfall and felt the spray of it on my face, I recapped. No Sheila, no closure, and no way I was hanging around in a world where the Flatties were right. I’d rather not give them the satisfaction of being right and allow the scientific community to continue to feel like they were correct . . . in the name of science, right? Or was that literally against science? No matter, the secret would die with me. I plummeted head first into an abyss, nothing but darkness as I craned my neck back to look . . . up? Well, it was up for me. It was down from here. All about perspective, I guess. I relaxed my neck; I didn’t want to be craning my neck back all the way in my last moments. Who wanted to go out with a stiff neck?
I repositioned my neck so that my head was facing forward . . . directly forward from my body. As if I were standing on the floor, in a diving pose, head faced forward. I was now upside-down, again, perspective, and watching the oceanfall. Watching the dropoff of the world, watching as I careened downwards and seeing the water sloping down in a perfectly straight line, a wall of water. And then it curved in, away from me, and it met rock. A rock wall curving back, tufts of grass scattered about, strong vines dangling, large rocks jutting out sporadically, acting like ledges. The wall continued to extend away from me as I kept falling at an alarming rate, and then the wall extended back so far that it revealed a cave! Cut deep into this magnificent cliff, a massive cave, with some unknown source of light deep inside it, illuminating it.
I still heard water even though I didn’t see water. I craned my neck back and looked back . . . up . . . to see there was no longer darkness ahead in my destination. A curved blue sphere was up ahead, and as I rocketed towards it, I realized it was the curve of the earth once more. It got closer and closer to me, growing bigger and bigger, the curve being less and less noticeable until I couldn’t notice it anymore . . . all about perspective, I guess. I realized in that moment that the earth was round! And this proved it! I saw the roundness of the earth from afar but as I got closer, I couldn’t make that distinction anymore. It was a sphere after all! But what I stepped out on, that was just a cliff. A cliff that somehow extended off the planet. The planet was a sphere with a diving board sticking off one little corner. This was the discovery of a lifetime! Not just my own lifetime, but of lifetimes including people far more important than me! I could share with everyone proof that the earth was round and simultaneously explain how we haven’t explored every inch of the planet, there are still unknown nooks and crannies. This “diving board” and this “oceanfall” were my discoveries! I’d have to come up with new names. If I had time. There was no time. These discoveries, they were coming with me, wherever I was headed. The ocean, the grave, no matter. They wouldn’t see the light of day. I wouldn’t be able to tell everyone about this diving board storing a little secret tucked up underneath it. Hidden.
I looked back to the secret. A cave. Brilliant light inside of it . . . from many lit torches. Fire . . . dancing atop sticks . . . wrapped in vines . . . crafted by . . .
I saw people. Faces, bearded, wide-eyed. I saw animals. Monkeys, elephants, pigs, horses, deer . . .
I saw one cat. So familiar looking.
I saw one woman. So familiar looking.
I tried to focus in on them, but that was a task that was difficult to do when you’re falling at breakneck speeds.
Break neck.
I craned my neck back and observed the unlimited blanket of blue that I was fast approaching. My neck felt stiff. But I had a feeling it was about to feel a whole lot stiffer. I was still in my diving pose, as I plummeted down . . . or was it up at this point? West? Southeast? Eh, who even gave a shit? It was all perspective, anyway. The one thing that wasn’t up for debate, the one thing I really needed to do all along, was gain some perspective, and I finally had. Maybe that wasn’t so bad. Maybe that would give me closure.