'Use of an Alternative Distribution Method for Philosophical Insight While Initiating a New Best Practice Recycling Approach' by Marie Gethins

I see it all now. A brown thing bobs in the surf and you standing on the shore or a pier or maybe even boat side. Uncertain at first. Seal? Otter? Nah, just a bottle. Then, it comes real close. There’s paper inside. So, you snag it in some fashion, pull out this letter and well, here we are.

I expect you opened this hoping it contained some fascinating mystery. The story of a castaway trapped on a tropical isle awaiting rescue. A treasure map leading you to an immense fortune in a secret location. Or perhaps the tragic saga of someone long dead whose tale of woe you can deliver to relations and solve an ancestral puzzle. They’d be ever so grateful; you’d be semi-adopted, become part of the family. Never alone on a holiday, spend every summer at their spread in the Hamptons or on the Cape.

No such luck, my friend.

Now, I can’t offer you riches or invite you to a fancy vacation house, but I’ve been around a bit, criss-crossing from sea to shining sea. No letters after my name, but I figure my life-learning is as solid as the next. Today I sorted bottles at the recycling centre, tossing them into dumpsters, hearing the craaaaack when they smashed and I’m thinking, life is a bottle.

Life is a bottle.

You start full to the brim, but it just drips out of you. Every failure or loss: parent, lover, job, car, home. But you’re made of tough material, fired at intense heat. Keep going, keep going. Roll with it, cause we both know, it’s better to be afloat in some wild-wide ocean, drifting along than smashed into a million pieces by some douche.