as unsinkable as i can be // the wilds

prologue.

There was something... translucent about the island.

Almost as if you could put your hand through it and your fingertips would meet a pane of glass that would shimmer into a screen and expose the fact that it was truly just a simulation.

That we would then be able to get hoisted out, the virtual reality goggles are taken off of us, and we would get to go eat the biggest cheeseburger and drink the biggest milkshake that the human race had ever seen.

God knows we deserved it.

No one understands what it was like there. What we went through. No one gets what it was like. To have death looming over your head for that many days and not know if you would make it to see the next sunrise, your life so far out there that you just... you wish that you could've done something better. You wish you wouldn't have complained about going to the grocery store with your mother, or worried about those stupid little tests that in the grand scheme of things meant nothing, or cared what she said about you or that you didn't have the shoes that everyone else did.

You wish you would've actually lived.

A common question that I'm asked about my time on the island is whether or not I liked the other girls. The only answer that I can come up with is that I don't really know. You're putting nine teenage girls in a situation that... that I can't even explain in words. It was a situation that had us questioning the tiniest things that every other girl did, afraid of dying from sickness or starvation, and not to mention the fact that oh, right, we're stuck on an island with no escape.

So it was less of a "did I like them?" and more of an understanding. Those other eight girls were the only girls who understood what I was going through. Yeah, we all had our own issues, and every single person responded to situations differently, but those were the people we had. They were all we had. Those were the girls who were there for you, not because they wanted to or they were going out of their way to be kind, but because they needed the same exact comfort that I was searching for, or that Rachel was searching for, or Leah or Dot or anyone else.

We only had each other.

But I did like them; in fact, I love them, even now, to this day. They were there for me. They saw me at my lowest point. Those girls mean everything to me.

One of the hardest things for me was not being able to write. Nora offered me her journal and pen plenty of times, but I could tell that was her only outlet. I couldn't mess with something like that, not when I noticed she never put it down. Leah used it once, maybe twice, but Nora... Nora used it as her lifeline. Those sketches I saw every once in a while were the only things that were keeping her from throwing herself into the riptide and letting nature take its course.

But not being able to sit down and just leave reality, leave everything behind, just write and write until your fingers are cramped and it hurts to bend your wrists... that was the worst. That was the moment that I realized that this was real. I couldn't use a stick and attempt to write stories in the sand. The tide would just grasp them and suck them away from me.

That island and those girls were my reality. And there was no way of escaping them.

It's taken me a very long time to work up the courage to write about this. But here I am, going slowly through the motions.

I'm here. I'm trying.

And I've never been more sorry.