The Island of Solitude

In the first half of 2020, the pandemic outbreak happened, so like many corporate workers, my working schedule inevitably changed. I started working at home. At first it felt great, blending work with personal life seemed not so bad at all: I had more time to myself, plus I didn’t need to stress about socialising with other people any more.

After a while, this whole working-while-relaxing thing started going south. Waking up in the morning, I heard the same familiar birds chirping sound every day. More often than not I couldn’t tell which time it was, since I was always working. And the more days I spent at home, I felt like the apartment I live in looked like a bird cage even more. Suddenly I realised that I was trapped in a cycle that I was powerless to break.

Then I don’t remember exactly on which day, which month, I began to have daydreams about living in a completely different world. There the law of physics is nothing like what we have now on earth. Everything in that world is constantly floating around but has its roots firmly planted in the ground. The sunlight is always evenly splashed, so that you cannot see harsh shades on those extraterrestrial creatures. Time doesn’t really flow in there. Energy is always recycled. Living beings there are all contended, fulfilled, and do not have worries for a thing.

The Island of Solitude slowly came to shape. I deliberately planted the idea of self reflection in each frame by repeating the same character in different forms. In my mind this experience of isolation is a solo adventure to explore what’s deep inside our mental world but we too often ignore it. That said, it is not to allude that people should brood over the past lives they had, but offer them another solution— closing our eyes and imagining walking into the island of solitude. There we can enjoy being by ourselves. We can even channel our old selves to have a nice heart-to-heart talk. Maybe in this simple world, we can all find our lost strength back.