There is an island, not a deserted one, no. It’s an island in the middle of Pacific, and a famous tourist spot. Its 12th July 2016, a number of tourists have turned up for vacation. Spread across the island are little trinklet shops, beach resorts, and other stuff tourists pay money for. Water sports is one thing which gets some footfall. Coral atolls around the islands attracts some to seek below the surface. And that takes them to our guy, a diving instructor, he gets a number of students, some experienced, some not, but always new ones. Tourists are there to enjoy their summer vacation. The thing with our guy is that it’s always 12th of July 2016. He doesn’t remember when was 11th of July, that is a distant memory. He is stuck on that date. Everyone around him keeps changing, everyday he wakes up to new tourists, to new colleagues, to new residents. Sometimes the latter two are repeated, but never more than a few times. Everybody knows him though, for them, he has been living on the island for 5, or maybe 6 years. He doesn’t remember how was 2010, or even 2011, or any of the days since then. Why did he move there? Does he have anyone elsewhere? He remembers his mother faintly, a little bit of his father too, standing besides her. Not sure if he had any siblings, or many friends. He explored his personal belongings many time, but never found anything useful. He had ‘misplaced’ his identity documents except for his diving certificate, which just read a first name, ‘Victor’.
It’s not that he has been like this forever, he is sure. He has been trying to get out of this situation ever since he remembers. But memory can hold so much. Everyday he wakes up, and thinks about the previous day. So much has happened on a single day, so many times. There is always some bad weather, some stupid people, some accidents. Some days, they are happening the same way, some days they surprise Vic. Yeah, that’s what people call him. A long time ago, Vic did everything he could to escape the island, but it’s so far off. The little seaplanes take 4 hours to reach nearest major island, but something always goes wrong. At times it was typhoon, other times it was some malfunction, and Vic always ends up in the ocean. He does wake up in his bed at 3:30 in the morning, but the memory of the crash is nevertheless traumatic. He did try to use a boat, but the story isn’t much different. He never made it to the other land. For some reasons, he doesn’t know what happens after 2 AM. He doses off, goes in trance, loses his mind, but he always wakes up in his cottage at 3:30 AM. He remember being up with those hidpsters once till 3, but was too high to remember any details.
For a while now he hasn’t been stuck in the middle of the ocean. It isn’t that he doesn’t want to get out of here. It’s just seems fruitless to try doing the same thing. He is trying to understand what’s happening with him. He is taking his time, it’s not running out anyway. There’s a little hope in heart that someday he would get out of this like Phil did in The Groundhog Day. Oh yes, that movie. A tourist told him about this when Vic told his story around the evening bonfire. “Your story sounds similar to the Bill Murray movie, you should definitely watch that”. He did watch that, the island wasn’t an isolated backwater. Thanks to modern technology, it was connected with whole world. Vic would spend a lot of days on the Internet. He did keep updated with the world, he needed to lot of time, as world was a little different everyday. There was no drastic changes, the history was pretty much the same, just a little odd thing here and there. World war 2 still happened, humanity did reach the moon, but some world leaders didn’t live or die the same time as Vic knew. He wasn’t on social media though, no Facebook, no Twitter, not even a google account. These could have given him some glimpse of his life before, some idea about friends outside of the islands.
Think It Yourself 