Glimmer
It's not the weirdness that gets him, the ever-growing list of bizarre occurrences that marks each day here. It's not even knowing that he'll never leave.
It's watching them fall apart. Lose hope. Oh, the baby helped, but then the crazy French chick took him and all hell broke loose all over again. Then the people from the tail section found their way to the beach, and there was even more insanity.
It should be easier. It's supposed to be easier when you're dead.
There are supposed to be answers. Peace. Anything but this deepening despair. He wonders if it's this way for everyone, or if it's another quirk of the island.
He's not alone. There are hundreds, thousands of people here, lost in shipwrecks, plane crashes, even a few ancients who came here in dugout canoes. The only ones not represented are the Others, as if they somehow found a way past the bottleneck that binds the island's dead to these rocks.
They're trapped here, unable to communicate, except sometimes when they trip into the dreams of the living. They cannot talk to each other. They can watch, pine after the miserable survivor's life they might have otherwise had, but they cannot hear, speak, touch.
He would give anything if he could somehow touch, give up this entire unlife if he could just give Shannon a shoulder to support her maddened weeping—but if he had to hear her sobs, what was left of him might die again and blow away on the breeze. It had been bad enough to watch her crack under the strain of his death, but to watch her crumple under the strain of her own—
It's cruel.
The island will not let them go.
the end