Taste the Rainbow

There was only a vast sea of blue.  An infinitely large landscape of a deep azure, with a couple of fluffy pure specks like islands in an ocean. Each wave lurched your raft, sending a scent of the salty water, jerking the vessel. It was as if a tiny hurricane had decided to take hold of my raft. I knew I had no control, so I just went with the flow of where the ocean decided to take me. Every dew-drop on that accumulated on the rubber boat was another sign of how long I’d been on this raft.

My yellow little barge drifted me across this expanse, kindly offering me safety to the frigid waters below. The sunlight made the floor of my rubber raft, while damp, rather warm. I also quickly learned that peeing off the side of a raft was not a particularly pleasurable experience. It reminded me of the daffodils my mom used to plant in the summer in front of our house. It made me feel less homesick, a glimmer of hope that I may somehow make it back to those flowers. Summers filled with lemonade, shucks of corn, the golden bales of hay that littered my front yard, every fragmented memory of my life somehow made this terrible situation better.

As the sun began to fall from my sight, the sky began to become shrouded in a thick veil of black. The sunset had long faded, leaving me with only myself, the dusk, and the shadow that chased us. The dark rims of my glasses made me doubt what I could really see, and required constant adjustment to maintain my limited visibility.  The wind has picked up considerably, and whipped me out of the raft like a rag-doll. All there was in the depths below was darkness, and it obscured my vision. I was uncertain if I had a prayer of making it out of this alive as the water threatened to pull me under into the abyss below. Somehow, I managed to feel my way up to the surface. The raft had managed to drift away, with the churning waters around me prying at me to jerk me back down. Swimming towards the raft was a near impossible feat, with the abyss trying to swallow me whole, so I was just trying to keep my body afloat. Wadding over there was tedious, but I managed to be reunited with my raft. I used every ounce of remaining strength I had to heave myself back onto my raft. The air was still freezing, with every inch of my body freezing as the breeze relentlessly whipped against my skin. My heart was beating out of my chest, like I was having a mini- cardiac arrest. Everything around me ceased to exist for a while. Eventually, the gales stopped and my fears were still as strong as ever, but my exhaustion overcame my terror.

    When I awoke, I first thing I noticed was a single green leaf that was stuck to my face. I peeled it off in confusion, and I noticed that my raft had washed up on a beach. My dingy was a dot on the surface on the island. To my back was the ocean that held me captive for so long, and ahead was a sweeping jungle of foliage and shrubbery that offered relief to a constant state of seasickness. Considering I hadn’t eaten in about a couple of days, I was prepared to consume just about anything. The canopies protected me from the wicked sun rays from overhead, and the floor below was cool to the touch. Dew drops formed on each and every lead, round reflections of the past. Bushy plants around me tickled my feet like imps, and the vines brushed against my arms harmlessly.