47. “You gonna open that door?”
“YOU GONNA OPEN THAT DOOR?”
YASMINE
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.
A master of zen, then.
I laughed alone in my room at 2 a.m, the sound echoing off the walls.
By month two the sun dipped below the horizon for a few hours each night, and by month four it was gone. I thought I was ready. I wasn’t.
I stopped trusting my eye for a while after that.
Light had always told me where to look, what mattered. Now everything existed in gradients of blue-black and artificial station glow, and I felt like I was relearning photography from scratch.
Half the time I was shooting by instinct and prayer.
When the light went, the station shrank. The same faces, the same meals, the same conversations looping like a stuck playlist. I started sleeping too much, then not enough, then at the wrong times. My body had forgotten what it was supposed to do.
The station psychologist held mandatory weekly check-ins. I sat in her office and told her I was fine.
“You’re not sleeping,” she said.
“I’m sleeping.”
“The logs say you’re in the gym at 4 a.m.”
“I like the quiet.”
She gave me that look—half pity, half I-know-you’re-full-of-shit. But she let it slide.
Hale called on a Sunday. “Hey.”
His voice hit like warm air after months of windchill.
I dropped onto the bed, pressing the receiver so hard against my ear it hurt. “Hey. Hi.”
“You sound tired.”
“I’m fine.”
“Uh-huh.”
A laugh slipped out, embarrassingly watery. I wiped my eyes with the heel of my hand. “How’s things over there?”
“It’s Texas. You’re not missing much.”
“How’s Dolores?”
“Mean as ever.”
The line crackled.
“How are you really?” he asked.
I opened my mouth to say the usual—work is incredible, I’m fine.
Instead the truth came out thin and shaky.
“It’s dark here all the time now. I forgot what the sun looks like. I miss you.”
The silence went on long enough that I checked the line was still open.
“I know,” he said finally.
“That’s it? You know?”
“I know,” he said again, quieter.
“Say something else.”
Another pause.
“Three more weeks,” he said. “Until Christchurch. Right?”
“Yeah.” I swallowed. “You remembered?”
“I remember everything you tell me, Yasmine.”
My throat closed.
“I have to go,” he said. “But I’ll talk to you soon.”
“Okay.”
The line went dead.
I sat there holding the phone long after the call ended, listening to nothing at all.
Three weeks later, the C-130 wheels touched down in Christchurch, and I breathed easier for the first time in months.
Green.
There was green here.
Trees. Grass. Things that grew. Colors that weren’t white or gray or ice-lit blue.
I stood outside the airport for ten minutes just breathing. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed air that didn’t hurt.
The hotel was a short shuttle ride away. I’d stayed there on the way in, four months ago, too keyed up to sleep. Now I just wanted a shower, a real bed, and twelve hours of it.
I checked in. Room 412, fourth floor.
The hallway was quiet, the carpet swallowing my footsteps so completely it made me uneasy. In Antarctica, every surface announced you. Metal rang. Ice cracked. Snow crunched. Here, I moved like a ghost.
I reached for my keycard.
A door opened behind me.
One room down.
Footsteps.
“Hey.”
My hand froze on the keycard. My lungs forgot how to work. I knew that voice better than my own heartbeat.
I turned.
Hale.
Here.
The hallway light caught across his face. He didn’t move toward me.
I didn’t move either. Couldn’t.
He took one step closer, voice low.
“You gonna open that door,” he said, “or am I kissing you right here in the hallway?”