Stranded. On a deserted island.
There is a very limited area to which I can keep myself, deep within the jagged sandy beach, just on the rim of the looming jungle. It grows dark so fast in that harsh, tangled copse of trees and greens. Just a few feet into that oppressive overgrowth, and I might never find my way back. Wild things prowl inside, and poisonous things, too.
I’m stranded with a few useful items… amongst them my lap top and router. My fancy sidekick cellphone. A few other electronics and wires of lesser note.
Somehow, I make myself believe that I get the router to work. That I have access to the internet. I think that my phone has a signal. I write email after email and text message after text message… begging for someone to come and rescue me.
At first, I feel safe.
After all, what stranded situation could possibly have gone better? I have a fully functional laptop that survived the wreck. I have internet access. Everything is fine. Not only is it simple as pie to reach out to my rescuers—I have a tool against the boredom while I wait.
I spend more and more time on the island, and nobody comes. Nobody replies to my emails.
I continuously glance over at the twisted wires of my router and other equipment, rooted in the grainy, dark sand… always just a little moist from the humid weather. I start to journal my paranoia that something will happen to it. I imagine what utter disaster might befall me if ever the slightest thing were to shift—a wave break too far ashore, and short circuit everything. I would truly be stranded, then.
Once, I saw the shadow of a large, predatory cat moving in the darkness of the jungle.
I ventured into it—often. Just those few feet that I dared. I kept myself to the first row of trees, climbing them, searching for food—collecting dry branches.
It was never proper day. There was only a gray, maroon darkness upon the troubled beach, or an even more oppressive void waiting to swallow me in the jungle thicket. Periodically, this gray maroon would sink into a black so absolute that I could not see a single foot in front of myself. This was night. There were no stars. It grew so cold at night that each one was simply a prayer to survive. I would desperately gather my laptop in my arms and stumble to my other equipment, and lay there with my arms over it, protecting it with my body while I slept, trying to draw warmth from its electronic hum.
The days were always too short. Always. And still nobody came to the rescue. Nobody replied…
Without the faintest realization that it was happening, I began to go mad.
Perhaps I was already mad… but I went off the deep end when I uncovered a human skeleton buried shallowly near the trees. It looked to have been male. I felt an instant bond with his dark, rotted remains—the last bits of flesh long since disintegrated from his fragile frame. It was only bone, dark bone, and I felt it drum an answering vibration in the core of my own flesh: grinning skeletal death.
I began to build a shrine.
Death was the name of my efforts, and Death was the name of my mind and soul. I smiled while I did it—a content, knowing smile. I used the branches I had gathered and some of his long bones to create the structure… nonsensical, thin, wavering. An architectural hiccup with no other use than to represent my dying. That was alright. I did not intend to use it as a shelter; I did not intend to live anymore.
It was an odd place to be—beyond my own life… I walked and breathed still, hungry, worn… but I had lost all investment in living. All connection to it. It was so utterly clear that no one was coming, and it had been so long, enduring those pitch black nights and those mercilessly short, oppressive days. The laptop sat abandoned a distance away, glowing onto the sand. Eventually, as I sweat my blood over the ritualistic structure, I forgot it existed.
At long last, I positioned his grimy skeletal head on the wobbly shrine. I was talking to it. What I said, I don’t remember… and I’m not sure I would ever want it played back to me if I could. I’m not sure it would have made sense. Perhaps I was enjoying some strange Lovecraftian devolution of tongues.
I started into his dark, empty eyesockets… I smiled blankly… sinking further and further into that gaze…
And then a riveting internal shudder struck me, rumbling up from my core and shaking my entire being. Fear. Blessed, human fear. And panic.
I ran to my laptop and pulled up my email again, writing another one to my mother—the first in too terribly long. “SAVE ME! FOR GOD’S SAKE, COME RESCUE ME!” Typing out that message was the most intense, silent scream for my own survival. I unleashed it into the universe with bitter hope that it would be received; that strange trust, when you send something into the internet, that it will arrive and connect with another human being… and at the same time, the strange, eerie paranoia that there is nothing but the machine. Grinning at you.
Perhaps they had all abandoned me. Perhaps they were sitting there, on the other end, reading all of my emails, but shaking their heads sadly, unable to or unwilling to ever come and rescue me. Cutting themselves off and not sending a single note; my loved ones leaving me to die, grieving for me already… or perhaps not grieving at all.
I heard a very different kind of rumble.
Looking up, I saw the stratus that had masterfully confined the sun for so long take on a thicker, more ominous shape. I saw it belch and turn in on itself, blackening with anger, growling with pure natural rage. It was going to storm. A destructive, all-consuming, tropical storm. I typed in a quick follow-up email to my mother, warning her that this might be the last time I could ever communicate.
Oh god. My equipment.
How I raced against that vicious water, clawing my electronics from the sand—running and tripping with wires and steel bundled up in my arms, spilling over. I had to find someplace safe to put it—I had to… If the internet was taken away, then there would be no more hope. No more hope… I would be so desperately cut off, so helpless, so alone and stranded… I would die there on that beach. I would rot. No more reaching out for help; no one would know my misery. No one would hear my cries.
I would die, alone. Whispering to the wind.
…I wasn’t even sure the internet existed anymore. But still, I had to save it.
The storm was making it so dark—too dark, too fast. There were never stars on this island; those damn clouds. What I wouldn’t have given for a single star to guide my step…
But instead I watched the twigs and jabbing rocks ahead of my feet fade into blackness as though they did not exist, the storm becoming a purely sensory experience, visible only with the occasional flash of lightning that left me more blinded than anything.
Finally, I found a safe, enclosed space that was big enough for my electronics. Just barely. I shoved it all inside and hoped for the best. And then I threw myself down at the entrance, hoping for the best, too.
