Page 163 of The Best Shot

When I first arrived, the light at three in the morning was the same as the light at three in the afternoon.

No one had warned me about that.

The cold, I expected. The isolation, I’d signed up for. But the light was endless. Shadowless. It flattened everything until time felt like a lie everyone had agreed to keep telling.

For the first few weeks, I’d stand at the window of my dorm room and watch the sun drag its low circle around the horizon without ever disappearing.

Now the same window held nothing but black glass and my own reflection.

Christchurch was three weeks away.

I was counting.

I hadn’t expected to be counting.

McMurdo didn’t waste energy trying to be beautiful. It was a mining town without the mine—dirt roads, squat industrial buildings, trucks that looked like they’d survived three wars. Diesel clung to your clothes, and the recycled air cracked your skin.

But drive an hour out onto the ice shelf and the world fell away. White so bright it hurt. Blue so deep it felt like falling upward. Silence that pressed back.

I shot obsessively that first week, burning through batteries faster than the charging station could keep up. Ice formations, tire tracks, sky, shadows, penguins, my own breath freezing against my scarf. Everything felt unreal enough to deserve documenting.

By the end of the first month, I’d stopped trying to capture everything.

The place was too big for that.

I started waiting instead.

The penguins helped.

They weren’t cute the way people wanted them to be. They were weird, dignified, slightly ridiculous, like retired professors who’d misplaced their glasses. I spent eleven days at Cape Crozier in a tent that shook every time the wind changed direction, eating freeze-dried meals that all tasted like salt.

But the colony. Thousands of them, huddled together against the wind, rotating in and out of the warm center like one slow-breathing organism. Males balancing eggs on their feet for months. Females returning from the sea, calling across the ice for the single voice that mattered among thousands.

Every time one called and another answered, I thought of Hale.

Email was a ritual.

The satellite windows cracked open twice a day, and we all lined up like sinners at confession.

Most conversations reached me hours late.

I’d open the group chat at 3 a.m. and watch everyone I loved exist twelve hours ago. Jokes already finished. Arguments resolved. Plans made without me because life kept moving back home even while mine felt frozen in place.

I wrote to Hale at night, when the galley was empty and the only sound was the heating system clanking through the walls.

Long emails. Stupid long. I told him about the ice fogging my lens every time I came back inside, the cook who played the same Johnny Cash record every Sunday, the doctor who bombed at stand-up but we all laughed anyway because laughter was currency down here.

I told him I missed him.

I didn’t tell him how much.

Some things didn’t fit in an email. They’d sit on the screen looking too big and too raw. I’d delete them and write something smaller instead.

The penguins remind me of you, I wrote once. You’d fit right in.

You calling me flightless? he wrote back.

No. Whole continent trying to kill them and they’re just standing there, unconcerned.