Blue Bottles

It’s 4:48 am on a cold Pittsburgh morning. A girl sits alone at her little nook. She is facing a great loss today. At wits end she desperately looks to her left and to her right. To her right a dark window frames snow laden tree branches. Everywhere else around her the room is a solid black. That’s all she can see or feel. The icy winter night is running through her weak veins. The little glass bottles that she had tossed out into the sea along with her desperate pleas have failed to extract a response from the world.

The oceans around the globe must be cluttered with those dragonfly blue bottles. “There must be someone out there who will find one. There must be someone who will understand. There has to be someone who will respond”, she had thought years ago when she had thrown in the very first bottle. It contained in its belly a small piece of paper with one sentence on it, “Hello, can anybody hear me?” A month later she decided to chuck another bottle out to the great blue. This time she decided to add one more sentence to the note. In her mind, the added sentence provided clarification. The third bottle had a longer note in it. By the 100th one, the writing covered two note book pages back to back, of her dearest thoughts. The girl had begun to pour her soul out into those meaningless notes.

At first she was sending out a bottle every night she saw a full moon. Then she started missing a couple of months. Then she sent one out every 3 months or so. But today marked the last day of the one year she had not tossed out a note to sea. Exactly 364 days ago she had promised herself that if she had not received a note back by the end of the year, she would give up. Tonight was the unfortunate night. Her hopes sealed and dreams abandoned, she has made a decision tonight. She has decided that there was no one else in this wide world. She has realized why her loneliness had started to become so dense and tangible. There had been no replies because no one else was out there; no one was left to find her bottles. She was all alone, the last one of her species.