As the ferry slows its speed, aisles of seasick tourists slacked against their seats with faces of disheveled relief, feel a certain superiority. Feel everything. Be sure of everything. The boat docks with a thud like the last train pulling into Grand Central Station, like a vessel to your own deliverance. You know nothing about this place but you can put your finger on its pulse already, steady as the surge. And honey, you’re home.

Go overboard at first. Glassy-eyed and barely lucid, let days glaze by cathartically, gluttonously, hair growing long, saturated by sweat and salt, tangled in the fingers of flings, tossed and twisted by the salty wind, hanging limp as your eyelids in the early morning heat. Maintain, sustain, endure; sipping on unending drinks as decorative and insubstantial as everyone here. Like a religion, the island encourages your capacity for illusion, then has you believe it’s a fucking virtue.

Bend your definitions of “fresh” or “hot” water. Also “internet.” Build your island family.

Get hurt. Again and again until you don’t, or you leave, whichever comes first. Then behave recklessly with the hearts and compassions of others, unbridled by consequences, absorbing the increasing costs with your own narrative. Realize most of the people you’re around have processed this evolution already. Trip on the instability. Slingshot into paranoia.

Come to know certain absolutes: nothing cures a hangover like being out on the morning boat, salt-seasoned air twisting your senses awake; there’s a comfortable safety in watching the water level rising from your porch, under a wall of monsoon rain, smoke circling underneath the awnings, encased for hours with whisky and whoever happens to have been nearby when the rain began; internet is not a necessity, roaches are inevitable, days off will leave you craving a return to work, and that on this island, every behavior, every misstep, every regret will be forgiven.

Crave rational behavior. Behave irrationally. Envy your own ability to live unaffectedly, but fear it too. What it means about who you now are.

Have nights of unrivaled enchantment. The dusty roads glitter, broken glass shards gleam with captivation, like magic, the night nearly over or the morning nearly arrived, depending on how you look at it. Flirt endlessly with valenced emotions, demonstrating no lack of vanity, steered by your own fire and matched by the collective lightning rod of those around you, as if you’ve all found each other for the express purpose of living through one another’s electricity. Know nothing about these people. Learn. Keep their secrets, write them down, save them for later.

Do not get involved with people who live on the island. Cheat.

Be viscerally aware that he’s watching you. Never admit that. Don’t be affected; don’t be affected. Hover near each other, chilly, rationing eye contact, knowing his stare will matriculate things you don’t want to know. Reality is the biggest inconvenience here, that and the methanol-laced drinks, the endless narcissism and the condition of the roads.

Leave. He’ll follow.

Have the worst day possible. I’m talking no free coffee mugs, customers who don’t speak English, freezing water, overcast sky. Everyone’s grumpy, bickering over lighters. Eat ice cream for breakfast to cope.

After months without shoes, develop callouses so insane that your feet could dance across any amount of glass, stone, souls.

Justify absolutely everything.

Take a week off from drinking. Cheat. Keep talking about how you’re going to start going to yoga, going to get that haircut, going to eat healthier. Do laundry once a month and harbor an enthusiastic pride knowing everything you own weighs less than three kilos.

Rent a villa half the cost of your monthly rent. Spend an entire evening in another, indulgent world. A pop-music-soda-commercial-Brady-Bunch-holiday-episode-Charlie-and-the-Chocolate-Factory-inspired sum of all our urges. Leave thinking differently, if only slightly. Take a hot shower. Take three.

Harbor an unrelenting nostalgia for certain days before they even end.

Miss weird things. Like the way your hair used to feel against your skin in the dry warmth of early autumn, the vivid scent of an oncoming city spring, or the steady drum of the subways, the subtle taste of nicotine on his lips, the dry clink of the radiator as the cold ravages out your window. Miss significant things, too, but acknowledge those less often.

Fall absolutely head-over-heels in love with the local children.

Wake up in the dim of morning, you know, that ethereal world of in-betweens and whispers. Peel your skin from his, releasing a hissing vapor of negative space snaking along your silhouettes, body heat pulsating in harmony with the fan’s swing. Trace the outline of his hand, slacked with sleep but still firm in its grip on you. Sense a metaphor in there somewhere. Feel him tighten around you as you shift away, shiver as he lazily kisses the back your neck, hovering in a dream. Your sensibility is as volatile and reckless as a live wire, exposed and frayed, sparking, sparking in the dim morning. Wake him up.

Somehow, some way, always manage to be on time for work.

Make several extremely reliable friends. One to fix your bike, one to kill your spiders (or various other island critters), one to listen to your bullshit island problems, all equitable variables to your condition of home. Accept their unabated rhapsodies and questionable nightly conquests barring no judgment, you’re in no position to draw a sepia-dipped brush over your own indecisions of yesteryear. Recognize something distinctive about each of them, maybe not something admirable, but something consistent, strong. An ability to make you feel safe. After all, the body and heart are unconnected on the island, and with the half they provide you you’re going to be okay. You’ll make up for the rest.

Invent lies to tell to tourists. Get more and more elaborate. Like, stretch the laws of actual science and common sense. Extra points if you get them to tell others.

Deep condition your fucking hair.

Grow overwhelmingly affectionate for the littlest things. Fully-pumped bicycle tires, a proper hand-washing, whole days without power cuts. Inheriting flip-flops, one-on-one conversations, accouterments acquired as people depart, hearing your own accent. Rain. But don’t overlook the incredible, either. Some days, actually acknowledge the volcanoes flirting with the sherbet skyline of nearby islands, the immaculate beachfront that lazily collapses into turquoise ocean, the smiling, God, the smiling freaking everywhere.

Be cheerful, no, be chipper. Push off the dazzling inadequacies of everyday life. If you can’t, go home.

Greet him with reciprocated politeness in the busy pace of morning, maintaining a chilled distance that thaws with the heavy heat of the day. Feel either independent and empowered or conflicted and repentant, but mostly just amused. Turn it all into lust. Leave your door open in the evening. Repeat.

After three months take a day off. Get bored by 10:30 a.m.

Write an email home, yeah you’re great, you’re great, everything’s going great. Lose Wi-Fi before you can send it. Forget about the draft.

Talk about the future, but only occasionally. With certain people, be too afraid to talk about it at all. We’ve all got the same answers anyway. It’s not about the thrill of what’s ahead or the melancholy of who or what you’ll leave behind, it’s just about what-is-next. Independently speaking. That’s who we all are, us transients. We are constantly making plans without taking our future selves into consideration, and then act as if we have. We are trained to believe in the temporary, living along the hemlines of expiration dates. But we don’t ever abstain on impulse for the sake of conditions. Not ever. And, at times, it can leave you as glittering and heartless as a shard of glass.

Try to remember what it feels like to truly miss people.

Hover in the doorway unceremoniously, arrested to adhere to something stable inside you, but you don’t know what. He pulls you close and you ready your patience to finally pour, to admit aloud how truly fucked up this all has been, how careless it is, how careless he is, with you. But don’t. It’s the greatest violation to make somewhere like this: to question the island’s social contract. We’re always trying to find an explanation for the magic and mystery inherent in our friendships, our relationships, rather than accept them for what they are, whatever that may be. And by the time we get an answer (if we do at all), we’ve missed out on everything rather enjoy what we’ve got. Because like it or not, this is perfection, or at least it can be if you let it. Understand this all at once. Let yourself grow.

Stay.

Occasionally long for the traditional, wrestling your capitalistically programmed objections to this drastically, um, “alternate” style of life. But understand you are actively pursuing life as you want it, not as it happens to be. After all, you fit here. Maybe not always, but certainly when it really counts. You and everyone else here. Glow, all together with a rampant hands-over-ears-I-can’t-hear-you optimism, learning to live with the surprise that this life doesn’t play like it did in your mind. Attach a “cheers” to every drink taken.

Whenever you do leave, for three days, three weeks or forever, miss everything. Gecko poop in your bed, overnight power outages, cold showers and the sheer sting of people leaving. The unbearable monotony, the unbearable pace of change, the unending celebration, the inhuman exhaustion. Hold on to every goodbye with an individual lassitude catalogued in your mind. These people, who against all odds, happened into your life and changed you. After all, we don’t know the effects we have on each other, but we have them.

Don’t forget to get some sleep.