Freewrite - “I’m just drifting”

4 days ago

The sky was gray. It seemed like the sky was always gray ever since the ship wreck. Lars was lucky to have made it out alive, but at the same time, you could say he was unlucky for that very same reason. He sat alone in that liferaft with nothing but the clothes on his back and a gnawing sense of despair..

This was not the vacation he had planned, not by a long shot. It looked like he might have to stay at sea for the rest of his life, however many hours that would be. As that depressing thought crossed his mind he noticed the sharks were circling. It was almost calming, the way they went round and round in the water. His phone was probably in pieces somewhere several thousand leagues beneath the sea (how much is a league anyway?) so this would have to do for entertainment. He’d almost come to think of them as friends. There certainly weren’t any dolphins, which was a shame. Dolphins seemed like they might have been good company.

As he drifted, he began to think about how he could have been at work. He had decided, just this once, to do something for himself, to take a day off that no one else expected. Yes, he had left the school in a bit of a lurch, but couldn’t he do this one thing for himself without inviting some massively disproportionate punishment? It pained him to think that instead of dying of thirst and starvation, he could have been safe and fed, 'imparting knowledge' to the uninterested.

And so he was stuck. With no hope for rescue. Until a cruise ship appeared in the distance.

It got closer and closer and closer…and passed through him and the raft like they were nothing more than mist. As he rematerialized, it occurred to him that he wasn’t even there anymore. All that was left to drift was his ghost.