After hours of walking into the horizon, with seemingly no end, I turn around and find her statue, looking up. Her neck bends back completely, face perpendicular to her body. Mouth wide open with a tensed jaw. For some reason I imagine a thick gray light rising from the bottom of her stomach, shooting straight out of her mouth into the sky, like a mouth-sized tube, stretching thousands of kilometers through the atmosphere and out into space. Maybe the fatigue makes it more poetic than it is. She begins walking again, disappointed, after giving up on catching a raindrop.

But our legs taste rest for the first time in hours, we realize just how sore they are. When you march continuously, it becomes almost mechanical in numbness, leaving little to feel. So we look around and decide: this is it.

We drop our rucksacks. I spread open the blanket. She anchors its corners with our bags and bottles, leaving enough space in the middle. We begin taking off our clothes, tossing them outside the blanket. I find my limbs not as shaky as I’d expect them to be in a bit of bitter cold.

I look around as I unbuckle my belt and take off my pants. It really is the perfect spot. It is the middle of the ocean. Frightening me in fleeting moments just how unreachable our location is—which of course is the point. As far as we can see, plain flat land. No humans, no construction, no trees. Not one bump. And the mist makes every direction look the same. We are lost. Nobody can come here. Even we don’t know our way out. I can do absolutely anything and nobody comes, for days, weeks, maybe months.

I take off my grey underwear. She takes off her black underwear. I take off my woollen socks. She lifts her foot to reach the woollen sock but decides to leave them on. She pulls out her notebook and pencil, turns to a new page, marks the date, and draws a table with two columns. I pull out two bands from my bag, blue and green. I go behind her to tie the yellow one on her forehead. After finishing the table, she chucks the notebook outside the blanket and circles around to tie the other on me.

She turns me around, fixes my band from the front. We catch gazes and share a faint smirk. This is it. We take another look around and then look back at each other.