This Is Not Real Life.
What’s it like living in Svalbard?
This is not real life.
Five months, the sun never sets.
Five months, the sun never rises.
A month where the world is washed in blue.
A month where everything blushes pink.
Light and dark stretched so thin they stop making sense.
This is not real life.
Half the year it’s the real North—
mountains of black rock and coal,
valleys of ice and knife-edge wind,
a silence so vast it swallows your breath.
The other half?
Icy-hot.
Sweaty in the cold,
cold when it pretends to be warm.
There are unicorns in the sea.
Narwhals with spiral spears.
Ancient monsters sleeping in the permafrost.
Diseases older than history,
frozen mid-breath,
waiting for a careless thaw.
This is not real life.
Look around—no green.
No vines to climb,
no grass to soften a footstep.
The colour of life has been deleted.
It should feel dead,
and some days it does.
A landscape of lunar grief.
This is not real life.
But the absence of evidence
isn’t evidence of absence.
Life hides in the cracks—
Lichen whispering against stone,
fox prints across a frozen river,
blood that still hums in my own veins.
Here, death is honest.
Here, life refuses to apologise.
Time itself collapses.
There is no morning,
no evening.
Only the long day,
the long night,
and a hinge of twilight in between.
Life crawls like a glacier —
Slow.
Measured.
Chaotic —
and somehow
the years still sprint.
It should be hell.
Maybe it is hell.
A place we were never meant to stay.
And yet—
I love it.
Here, my body steadies.
Here, my mind wakes.
Emotionally richest I’ve ever been.
Financially clean,
physically alive in a way that burns.
Health and wealth in a kingdom of cold,
while my African spirit starves for green.
Maybe that’s the point?
Like a phoenix,
you have to die to be born.
Every breath of ice
burns away the old story.
Every step on frozen rock demands:
“shed what you were.”
Freeze.
Crack.
Break.
Begin again.
Death is everywhere.
And somehow
that’s why I feel
most alive.
This is not real life.
But maybe….
It’s the truest life
I’ve ever known…
Is this real life?
