There is an island surrounded by a violent and churning sea. The sea’s rage can be heard as it sends waves to assault the shores of the island but it can not be seen. This sea lies hidden under the rocks of the world; there is no sun, and no moon to glint in the reflection of the water or to be torn apart by ripples. There is only the sound of the thrashing waves, the marching assault of the sea, an impending army. A watch could be set by the pounding of these waves, they are constant as a heartbeat.

 

Heartbeats are fickle though. They race at the slightest hint of  love and fear. Sometimes they skip beats in the song, a misstep. The island though is not as easily swayed as the waves that torment it. The island is stubborn, and stands as unrelenting as the force that tries to overtake it. 

 

Unstoppable force meets immovable object: the waves always pound occasionally changing their rhythm speeding up or skipping a beat but always pounding, and the island always stays exactly where it is never changing. 

 

The shores of the island are littered in sea glass. If there was light in this ocean under the world the shores would gleam in a kaleidoscope of blues, and greens, and browns. The once jagged edges of these glass pieces have been softened by the water and sand. Safe to pick up, but there is no one to collect them. 

 

At least not for many years, not for many changes in the ocean’s song, and many years of indifference from the island. 

 

But then the girl washes up on the island’s shore. 

 

There is sputtering, and flailing– a gasp for air. A struggle to  keep a head above water. There is resignation. Her limbs are too tired to keep fighting the ocean that has wreathed for thousands of years without breath, her eyes can see no point of safety in the total darkness. 

 

And just when she gives up the girl is thrown onto the shore of the island. The ocean waits, its waves merely lapping at the island, quieter and softer than it has ever been. The ocean waits for the girl to be rejected, to be thrown back in. 

 

The girl coughs and chokes, her feet still being tickled by the water. She still can not see anything, but she can feel the hard solid glass under her palm. She doesn’t remember how she got to this place. She never will. 

 

She waits too, for the island to toss her back into the sea. 

 

She is as surprised as the sea when a light in the centre of the island flickers on. She averts her gaze, her eyes burning in the sudden light. After she has squinted out in the distance for several minutes, letting her eyes simply get used to the light, she turns around again to look to the source. 

 

There is a lighthouse in the center of the island. It was not there before, the girl knows. Oh it could have been, and in the absolute darkness of the sea under the world she would not have seen it, but she knew the lighthouse was new. 

 

She stumbles to her knees, and then after a battle with her muscles her feet. They slide over the smooth and slippery surface of the broken glass beach. All the glass has been softened, by the oceans anger, by time’s indifference. Her bare feet are not cut as she makes her way to the lighthouse. 

 

The girl lives on this island, by this sea, in this light house. She does not age, or change she just is. The island provides for her, and she accepts. In exchange she starts organizing the glass on the beach. 

 

It takes hundreds of years, and every few decades she changes her system. She starts with colour, but then get bored with the way the light from the house glints off the separate colours. She tries by size, by sharpness, by feel. She organizes, and destroys her system, and re organizes again. 

 

She is kept busy by the ocean, which every so often will offer up new pieces of glass. These ones are too new, and she leaves them where they are to be softened before she figures out where they belong in the collection. 

 

One day the girl decides to organize the beach glass by shape. She is sorting through a pile of circular shaped glass close to the shore of the island when she hears the crash. She looks to the ocean in time to see the bottle break. 

 

It takes many years, and this to happen twice more before she realizes this is where the glass is coming from. She realizes something else too, “You know,” she says, outloud or in her head she does not know. She has been on the island for so long she is surprised she remembers language let alone the mechanics of speaking it. “You should give them more gently. The way you tossed me.” 

 

Time passes, or the girl thinks it does. She marks change by the new additions to her collection, and that is how one day she knows time passes from her conversation with the sea to now. 

 

One day she goes to the beach and the girl finds among the new glass not shattered pieces but a bottle intact. 

 

There is a message inside. The girl reads it, and understands. She thanks the ocean, and takes the bottle back to the lighthouse. She places it on a shelf. 

 

More glass comes, but more bottles too survive the force of the sea. 

 

“I love you,” “I hate you,” “Dear John,” “Sweet Lady,” every bottle has a message. She reads them all at first, and then none of them. She recognizes that names are written on the outside of the pages inside the bottles, and she read the names only, but never opens the bottles again. 

 

There is an island surrounded by a violent, and churning sea under the earth. On this island is a lighthouse created for a girl. She sorts the broken glass of the island, and saves the bottles that she can. 

 

She is waiting for one specific bottle, one message in her own handwriting.

 

 She asks the island for trees, and then for a saw. She asks again for a hammer and nails. She builds, she sorts, she waits. 

 

The day will come when the right bottle will wash up on the island. When she recognizes her handwriting, her name on the writing inside. She will open the bottle, and inside there will be a map. She will board the boat she has built and leave the island to take a turn sailing, and living on the violent sea. The light in the lighthouse will go out for the first time since it was lit, and the sea under the earth will be plunged into darkness again.

 

A day will come after that, when she will roll up the map, place it back in the bottle and toss it into the sea. The day will come when she will toss herself into the sea too, and be washed up on the island again, having forgotten that she has done this before. The light will turn on in the lighthouse, and she will spend many days waiting for her own message in the bottle. 

 

This will all happen one day. It has all happened already. 

 

But for now the girls sits on the shore of the island, sorting glass, and listening to the sea. 

 

The bottles in the lighthouse wait too. Hundreds of them. Eventually their recipients will come to this place too. This is the island of the Unsaid Stories, guarded by the girl, and the sea. The island will not relent to the sea, and the girl will not stop sorting glass because they know: the messages in those bottles, like all stories, demand to be heard.