Alana Saab, New York City, USA
There is a place called Dragon Island that no one can find on a map.
Dragon Island: A pseudonym. A sanctuary. Some would call it a paradise but there were no palm trees and it wasn’t always warm. In fact, for a quarter of the year the place was covered in snow and a biting wind chill coming off the ocean. During this time, the ferry didn’t run and Dragon Island was abandoned. It was, in this way, seasonal.
On Dragon Island, the evenings were neon, no candlelight. And the mornings were sun and sex and sheets that so desperately needed to be washed. In the early summer, like when She and I were there, it was a place where some roamed naked on the sand. Running with their dicks bouncing. And we were laughing.
A week before I stepped on the island, we were in the city covered in a white comforter. It was dark out but no stars were visible outside our window. Here they never were. Under the starless sky of the city, I asked her why they called it Dragon Island. She said it was because the heat there, independent of the season, was fiery, brutal.
But why call it something other than what it is?
To that, she just smiled and gently kissed my cheek:
You’re going to love it.
A week later on Memorial Day weekend at 9AM, I stepped off the ferry and onto the boardwalk with my duffle bag pulling at my shoulder. At the end of the dock, I saw her face lit by the morning sun. I walked quickly towards her. When I reached her, I fell into her arms and kissed her lips to the sound of men in leather speedos eating lunch with one another. She whispered something into my ear, but I couldn’t hear exactly what it was. Maybe she said:
Welcome to Dragon Island
Or maybe:
Welcome home.
Whatever it was, I felt a tear roll down my cheek. At first, I thought it was sweat, but then another fell from my other eye. When she let me go, I quickly wiped the tears away. She grabbed my bag and threw it around her shoulder. Then she reached for my hand and walked me past the pantry, past the pizza shop, past the fire station and towards the bamboo-lined wooden sidewalks that lead to her brother’s dragon home.
That early summer on Dragon Island, the heat was not only brutal but biting, like the winter air over a year ago when she and I met. No matter the season, she was, both in the midst of heat and freezing cold, whatever was needed. By this I mean, when I was too hot, my body curled into hers, and her skin, like an ice pack, cooled me down. Then when I was shivering, I’d wrap my limbs around her, sandwiching my toes between her calves, and wait for the warmth. She and I together always reached the perfect equilibrium.
That afternoon on the first day I arrived, we sat on the dock with our bare feet swinging over the water. I stared at the white boats that were decorated with rainbow flags and string lighting. Men danced and kissed one another. I watched them as she reached her hand around my waist and kissed my almost sunburnt shoulder. The tenderness on my skin, only a warning to what could have happened had I not lathered myself in sunscreen at three. Almost burnt. Almost pain. Almost. Almost. Almost.
It was only after one left Dragon Island, floating away on the ferry, that one realized Dragon Island—in the midst of the world, in the world of time (beginnings, middle and endings), in the world of space (here, there and elsewhere)—Dragon Island was an island of almosts.
But when one was on Dragon Island, everything seemed complete and infinite. The happiness came from this feeling of completion, of wholeness. The tears, you see, were only a premonition. The tears were for the future, but the future existed far from Dragon Island. The past, too. On Dragon Island, the present lingered in the sand and encroached the wood pilings that held up the dragon homes. The front doors, mouths. The bodies that passed through them, fire.
And there were no cars on Dragon Island. Only ones reserved by the police and fire department. Official vehicles for official people who, yes, were on Dragon Island, and so yes, to your question, the world knew about Dragon Island. We were not hidden. We only called this place by another name, so that no one in the outside world, when we spoke of that place from the summer, would know where we existed so freely, so happily. They would search on a map for such a place with a name like fire, but they would never find it, and, by the time they looked, we would be far gone.
There were two restaurants on Dragon Island. One that served pizza. The other, things like burgers and tacos. Still, they closed early. When newcomers like me came to the island they searched in the moonlight for food or a grocery store, but none were open after eight, and often the newcomers went to bed hungry. Newcomers, at first, did not like Dragon Island. After all, they were hungry. It was only in the sunrise of the next day with lovers coming out of their houses, with naked bodies and half-naked bodies burying themselves in the sand, with glitter that lived on the skin from the evening before, that newcomers came to see Dragon Island for what it was. Eventually, they learned the ways of the island. They learned the pantry on the boardwalk was barely a grocery store, and yet it was enough. They learned that hunger can be filled in different ways. Like skin. Like salt drying under their fingernails. Like the arrival of a ferry carrying someone you can’t wait to hold in your almost-sunburnt arms.
By the time sunset came, those on Dragon Island looked in awe both at the sky and at the human next to them. Eyes often filled with tears, not for sadness but for the lack of it. We weren’t used to being so happy. But on Dragon Island it seemed we had no other choice. For this happiness we felt, we wanted to crawl out of our skins. Instead, men hid unmarked vials of drugs in their pillow cases and took them, in the evening, to numb the mind so they could touch the human next to them (yes, the same one from the sunset) without fear. As if the world outside of Dragon Island hadn’t tried to keep them apart. As if they would never lose them.
On the dock at sunset, after a day of bathing in the dragon sun, she turned to me and said:
What if we never went back?
And when she said this, I smiled and squeezed her hand tightly, feeling every line in her palm press against mine. With a smile on my face that felt foreign to my muscles, I said:
I’d like that.
I wondered if all those fortune tellers from my past had seen that moment: her, me, us, sitting at sunset on Dragon Island unafraid to pull our bodies close in our bathing suits, breasts up against one another , and kiss beyond the carless sand street. To kiss in a way we never could or would back on the mainland. Had everyone, but me, known all along that I was destined to love another body like mine?
After sunset in her brother’s empty dragon home, we laid in the guest bedroom. Like the men on the beach, we got undressed one layer at a time. And then we let our bodies touch. We had been together for over a year, but that night something felt different. In a place unlike anywhere else on earth, a foreign place we called by another name, she felt like home. Not the starless sky city I called home or the one a state away, but a home like an island where everyone was safe and nothing bad could happen.
As we laid naked in bed, she asked:
What if we never left Dragon Island?
I looked into her eyes and meant every word that fell from my mouth:
I’d really, really like that.
She smiled. And I smiled. But then, in the corners of her lips, I remembered that in ten or fifteen years’ time, the ocean would come to envelope the island. With every come-and-go wave sprinkled with glitter, the shoreline would rise to take over the beach, then the dragon homes and then the boardwalk where we watched the sunset together. Soon, nothing would be left of Dragon Island. And where did that leave us?
Alana Saab is an NYC-based experimental literary writer and award-winning screenwriter. Her work explores themes of mental health, trauma, queerness and the transcendent through a metamodern approach. Her debut experimental novel, Please Stop Trying to Leave Me, is represented by Janklow & Nesbit. She is an alumnus of The New School (MFA in Fiction), Columbia University (MA in Psychology) and NYU (BA in millennial storytelling). As a teaching artist, she facilitates writing workshops with survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault and human-trafficking.