Your message in a bottle: on finding yourself lost

Suppose one day, you wake up and

you find your are lost.

All at sea.

Stranded. Marooned. Alone.

In what way are you lost?

This land you are stranded on is strange. This land you’ve suddenly been stranded on, you realise you’ve been stranded on for a lifetime.

Even you seem strange - strange to yourself. You suspect you’ve been strange to others for quite some time. Oh god. This startling land that surrounds you is a foreign motherland. Mother tongue is foreign.

Out of your mouth parts you attempt to shape the air into a form of sound, noise, word. The air turns away. No one, nothing answers.

The world continues its turning away. Only the moon stays turned towards you. Old stone hearted poker face man moon. Or rabbit. Whatever. Pulling you this way and that. Low tide. High tide, Low again. Low. Again.

It must be you.

No in-roads.

It all seems as you’ve wasted everything. if you haven’t explored anything thoroughly enough …or maybe lightheartedly enough? Did you try too hard? - You doubt everything now.

You lost the hope of finding the treasure that was meant to be here, the treasure you thought you’d find on the island. You (bravely) lost all the battles, the peace-making, the ventures, the adventures.

Maybe you should have put your hand up in school (where the stranding began) and asked for help. Don’t be daft! (Everyone falls about laughing.) Outcast. It’s not only the being last to get picked for the team, its the learning to expect it. - Not a good lesson at school.

Adrift in a world that shut you out. Adrift in a world that you shut out.

If you found yourself lost, what would you write or draw or paint on your three blue-lined pages of foolscap before rolling it up and putting it to sea in your one and only screw top glass bottle?

Suppose one day, you wake up and

you find you are lost.

In what way are you lost?

Has this happened before?

How did you find your way back?

Or, would you even want to be rescued?