The next morning I decided to traipse inland in search of water.

I methodically stumbled over sticks and rocks. The burn on my stomach hurt more to look at than in reality. From my minimal knowledge of injuries, this may be a second-degree burn, not quite a third-degree burn. If my mother would ever come out of her study, she would shove me some peroxide and paper towels and order me to shut up about the pain because it didn't require the emergency room. It took all my willpower to stymie chuckles when she caught pneumonia following the same philosophy.

The jungle had been dressed in all sorts of crazy garb, from magenta to lemon to gray-green, but none bore fruit. All looks and no value. There was a wide rift between the beach and the initial step into the jungle, the pieces of the airplane still scattered up till here. I've been walking for at least six hours, and nothing but dense jungle remained. There was a whiff of leaves and water and occasionally, kerosene, but nothing significant.

Being near the equator, the wet season had already arrived in early November. It shouldn't be too difficult to find a body of water, and subsequently find enough sticks to build a shelter and sharpen them into spears. It all sounded painless in my head— plain picking up and chopping, in other terms tedious labor, just like Boston.

The week before I headed back to college, Paula told me the only way she kept herself sane was by writing down her thoughts and speaking them. Her line of logic couldn't be argued with— dump a thought onto the page, and speak it to release it from your system. It was foolproof, and now I see why she held it so dear to heart. The whole experience has been confusing and I just couldn't put a finger on my thoughts— they ran too fast for me to catch them. My method of thinking hasn't been more complicated; that's why it was so hard to cultivate ways of controlling my mind. That made it so easy to lose, and being here all alone seemed to accelerate the process. I was already imitating animal calls in hopes of luring easy food (though I had no way to kill it).

To stop myself from bursting like a pressure tank, I stumbled up a tree and flashed my rhinestones attached to my shirt to catch as much sun as possible.

"Help!" I cried, though the plea brought on even more hopeless impossibility.

I flashed another signal, scrutinizing the wide canvas of a sky. The sun had began flattening her sheets for nighttime, sending yawning streaks of orange and red past the ocean line. It was like holding onto the last of the light which remained, the sunlight. If only I had a bag to store all the light in, and I could send a signal during the night, where I seemed more noticeable than just a glint of metal.