There was a time, when he was very little, when he used to stand in his aloneness, and the tears would be drifting off his eyelids, and he would be standing there for hours. His tears would never accept to gush out of his eyes, where he could chuckle, and eventually end up coughing - for a cough is a clear voice ordering them back into their hiding, so they just drizzled out of him, smoothly. But when he stopped thinking, and trying to know, things changed.
As the world near him became colder to him, his tears slowly began to turn to frost, until one day they just froze and the world got really fuzzy and he couldn't see out of himself, and he panicked. He wasn't bothered about not seeing the near world around him but he still wanted to see the horizon, and in his desperation he freaked out; his incapacitated little wings were moving frantically, his little feet were paddling very hard the harshness of the ground he stood on and his whole body ended up revolving around itself. And he screamed, and screamed, and his shouting squeaked, until his forehead sweated all the way from the flesh of his heart, and so the warmth melted the hardened tears. From then on his tears lost the luxury they once had; they could no longer take their time and paint the little streaks, streaming streaks, and streaking streams, tears, down his body, to his feet, and to the ice, where they would unite with the earth he knew. They had to be put away quickly before they hardened on him, put away, by blinking. And so he blinked, and his blinking, became as necessary as his breathing.

Pete is on his iceberg, it's drifting. With him he has two things: a pair of green flippers three sizes bigger than his feet, and himself. He is standing very close to his flippers. Sometimes he picks them up and holds them, firmly, and at other times not so tight. It all depends on his little wings and how they feel, whether they feel a gap between themselves and his body, or not. It's the feeling of this gap, a vague feeling. Pete only feels it between his wings, but you might feel it in his eyes if you were looking at him. You won't read much from his expression, but if you look more than passingly you might fall in the gap yourself. The vagueness is that you won't know whether the abyss is truly bottomless, and if not, how deep will you fall? There's another vagueness: if there is a gap then could it be filled, and how much will it take to fill an abyss? Pete doesn't think anymore, and he doesn't try to know, he just holds the flippers,