Everyone likes to find a bottle that was lost at sea. It's green glass glistening with saltwater sliding down it's smoothed edged rounded by the water and sand it has floated and rolled through to get to the base of your feet. The shadow of a rolled piece of paper outlined by the light of the rising or setting sun (no one finds glass bottles that have been out at sea at noon. It doesn’t make for a good story. Excitement always happens at the beginning or the end of the day. The middle of the day is for the mundane).
The excitement of chipping away at the red wax seal cracked and dried by the sun bearing down on it for its years at sea is palpable. Weeding a finger into the bottle’s mouth trying to fish out the note builds the anticipation of what treasure has been discovered. One starts building a web of possibilities like a spider in the dew of the morning considering all that they will catch in its stickiness. A love letter? A memorial? A proposal? A poem?
This is the excitement of being a person floating along in this world. What do we contain? What is inside? What possibilities do we hold? Who will discover us and hold us up to the light to see us bare and transparent? Who will work to break us wide open for the world to see us exposed for who we are inside? Who will exclaim at our contents that have been trapped in the glass shelter as we have bobbed and weaved through tides, storms filled with waves and salty froth, slide by the sides of creatures large and small roaming the earth, and through fields of seaweed bunched to provide shelter for the ocean’s smaller creatures exposed in this great mass of openness.
Not all messages in a bottle are found. Not all messages survive the crashing of the waves as they approached the shore to land. Not all messages are celebrated and rejoiced over. Not all…
Some are buried deep in the crust of the shoreline. Some are broken by a traumatic event either at sea or on their way to safety. Some are lost for lifetimes missing tides that guide their way home. Some get stuck in cycles of mindless wandering. Others have the wax on their seal slowly crack away or leak and as they take on the salty sea water within, the black ink of their message slowly lifts off the paper and dissipates into the black and green and blue sea water - broken and dispersed on minuscule levels through an entire body of water that covers a world they never got to discover. The paper weakens and is nibbled by tiny little mouths of tiny little creatures as the green glass bottle sinks lower and lower. Out of the sunlight meant to make it shine, into an abyss of darkness that covers it’s potential and possibilities where no web will be created to wonder where it’s been and what it has meant.
Trapped.
Trapped in this glass shell of mine. Floating in between tides. Hit and misses of making it home. To the shore. Where first I was thrown. With a wish tossed aside into the sea. Into the tides. Drifting for years while my message screams inside. Railing against the glass trying to break free from this wax cap that locks me out from the web of possibilities that others get to gain clout.
Lost at sea.
That is me. That is we. That is most bottles that get sent out with hope, excitement, with wishes and kisses that we will make it back. To the shore. To let people know - that there was something delicious about what we had to share.
But as the ink fades from the sun or from the shade of the depths of the abyss, we can feel hope withering free, floating back up to the sun from somewhere in the sea. Caught in a glimpse by a fisherman or seagull flying by. A flash of light reflecting off the crests of waves who know that even though missed, we existed.
