"Where the Water Left Me"

Where the Water Left Me

The boat had been my escape — a wooden cradle rocking on uncertainty, sailing toward a future I couldn’t name. My father built it, my mother blessed it, and I, at seventeen, ran away on it. I didn’t run from abuse or danger. I ran from absence — the kind of silence that grows loud inside a house after someone dies. My brother had passed six months before. He was the heartbeat of our family, and when his heart stopped, ours did too. So I sailed off with the illusion that movement would feel like healing.

I was wrong.

The storm came on a Wednesday. I remember because I had just written “Day 12” in my journal and circled it like it meant something. I was halfway between nowhere and a place I hoped existed. The sky bloomed black, and the sea began to speak in screams. The boat, strong as it was, cracked under the weight of those waves. I didn’t cry. I didn’t scream. I just held on until I couldn’t.

When the boat sank, I sank with it.

And yet, I woke up.

When I opened my eyes, I was on the edge of a forest. My body was bruised, lips cracked, clothes soaked with seawater and sand. The sun was cruelly bright. Around me, the trees stood like silent witnesses — tall, still, and untouched by everything I had just endured. I had washed up on an uninhabited shore, somewhere far from the world I knew.

No phone. No compass. No food.

Just me, the forest, and time.

The first few days were survival stripped to its bones. I ate berries, most of which I prayed weren’t poisonous. I found a freshwater stream and followed it until I discovered a cave shallow enough to sleep in. I drank rain. I fashioned a crude spear from a branch and sharpened it against stone. I didn’t know how to hunt, so I didn’t — I waited near the water until fish got close enough, and sometimes, I got lucky.

Every sunset was a masterpiece. Every night, the forest turned into a choir of sounds — howls, chirps, rustles. At first, I was terrified. Every snap of a twig made my breath hitch. But gradually, the sounds became familiar. I learned to mimic them, even answer them. I stopped being afraid of the dark.

I started to belong.

By the second week, my body had changed. My legs were lean from walking. My arms, stronger from climbing and lifting. My skin had bronzed under the sun. But the biggest change was invisible — my mind had quieted.

I had no mirror, but I could feel my brother in my bones. Every time I whispered to the stars, I imagined him listening. “Can you believe this, Leo?” I’d say. “Your idiot sister’s surviving.” I spoke to him as if he lived in the trees now, as if he’d been the one who pulled me from the water and placed me on this shore.

On Day 20, I stopped counting days.

I began counting moments instead:

— A deer that looked me in the eyes and didn’t run.

— A storm that I danced through instead of hiding from.

— A fire I made that actually stayed lit through the night.

— The first time I heard myself laugh and didn’t feel guilty.

On what I now know was Day 30, I saw smoke in the distance. Not mine. Not from the forest. It was the grey, columned kind — the kind that comes from people.

Hikers. They found me.

When they asked how I survived, I shrugged. “I listened,” I said. “The forest speaks if you let it.”

They looked at me like I was mad. Maybe I was. But I was also more alive than I’d ever been.

I returned to the world not as the girl who had left it, but as someone else entirely. I don’t sail anymore — not yet. But I do walk often, always toward trees. I bring food to the forest now, not just take from it. And sometimes, when I’m alone, I speak aloud, knowing my brother is still listening.

He didn’t save me from the water.

He saved me in the silence that followed.

And the forest — it didn’t just shelter me.

It gave me back to myself.