by Holly Rayner
THREE
Sarah peered into the cloudy bottle, trying to discern any of the contents within. When she couldn’t make out anything besides the paper, she tried to pry the cork off the top, stopping only when her fingers stung from tugging.
Still no luck.
Intrigued, she pocketed the little bottle and made quick work of walking across the beachfront and back to her tiny apartment a few blocks away. The sun was melting into the sea along the horizon, and Sarah shivered a little as a cool breeze blew across her bare shoulders. She had opted to stop at home after the spa and change into something more beach worthy—a tank top, a pair of shorts, and flip-flops. She kicked her shoes off at the door as she entered her apartment, palming the bottle and placing it on her small kitchen table.
Watching it from the corner of her eye, as though waiting to see if it was going to move, she grabbed a bottle of merlot and dug the wine opener into the top, releasing the cork with a noisy pop. After she poured herself a healthy glass—it had been quite a day, after all—she glanced at the opener and then at the little bottle, and she got an idea.
She sat at the kitchen table and gently held the bottle while she twisted the sharp, curly tip of the wine opener into the cork. It looked like it hadn’t been placed by a machine, so she imagined that time and water pressure had pressed it down so it couldn’t be opened with a simple pull. When the corkscrew was deep enough, she rocked it back and forth, pulling. After a few good tugs, the cork released, her hand flying back from the force.
Sarah dumped the bottle upside down and shook it a few times until a corner of the paper stuck out. Slowly, she pulled it out with her freshly painted nails, careful not to tear anything. When the little piece of paper was fully removed, she unrolled it and read.
The note was from a lonely little boy living in a place called Al Jayah. As she read his words, her heart ached for him, so alone, so desperate for a friend that he would send a message with nothing but hope across an ocean. Sarah placed a hand to her heart as she finished reading, laughing at the last bit about how he had been called in for dinner. She could imagine it perfectly—a little ten-year-old boy by a river, hope in his eyes as he sent his message out into the world.
Setting her wine glass down far away from the little slip of paper, Sarah stood and pulled a sheet of computer paper from her printer, grabbing a pen on her way back to the table. She took a breath and then began to write the little boy a response.
Dear Ali,
Sarah sat with her pen hovering over the next blank line. What could she possibly say to a ten-year-old? She was likely not the type of friend he was looking for. For starters, she imagined he would want a friend who was at least in the ball park of his actual age. Would he be disappointed that she was the one who had found his letter?
She realized then that she hadn’t even written a date in the top corner, which was something she had always been taught to do at school. That thought led to another much more pertinent one.
When had this letter been written?
It was tough to tell how old it actually was. Sarah perused the document, trying to find a date anywhere on it. When she saw nothing, she looked back at the bottle. At the bottom of the cork there was a series of numbers written down, and Sarah quickly realized that was where he had put the date.
The note was twenty years old.
Sarah frowned, feeling foolish. Of course the note was old. How many people found messages in bottles within the same month, or even year, that they were put out? Looking at the note again, she realized she would be about the same age as Ali, and she wondered what had happened to him after he’d written that letter.
Her reverie was interrupted by the chiming of her phone, indicating a text message. With a sigh, Sarah rolled the little paper back up and placed it into its bottle, where it would be safe. When she looked at her phone, she saw a text from her friend Jen that wasn’t entirely unexpected.
Emergency meeting NOW. You did NOT break up with Jon! I’ll be there in two minutes with pizza. Be ready.
Sarah couldn’t tell if she felt more like laughing or crying. She knew she would have to explain the circumstances of her day to everyone eventually. She’d considered just posting about it on social media and being done with it then and there. Some people deserved a face-to-face explanation, though, and Jen was one of those people.
She was, after all, the reason Jon and Sarah had gotten together in the first place.
Moments later, the buzzer rang throughout Sarah’s apartment, and she pressed the button to let her friend in. Jen whirled in on a cloud of indignation, her arms loaded with a large pizza box. Sarah quickly took the box and set it on the table while Jen let out a stream of commentary.
“You and Jon broke up after two years of being together? I thought you were the dream-team couple—you guys were perfect for each other. What the heck happened? All that work I put into matchmaking, and now you’re single. What a waste!”
Sarah had sat at the table and stared pointedly at Jen, waiting for her to finish her tirade. When she did, she joined Sarah at the table, taking a seat and staring at her in disbelief.
“Just—what happened?”
“I’m asexual. Just found out today,” Sarah joked.
Jen rolled her eyes.
“Oh please. We both know you’ve been boy crazy since well before college. Although I may question that now, since Jon is a perfect specimen of a man and now I have two friends who broke up with each other. Do you know how awkward that’s going to be?”
Sarah reached across the table and placed her hands on her friend’s shoulders, forcing her to be quiet.
“Calm down, woman. It’s not going to be the end of the world. Jon and I parted on good terms. We’re just not meant to be. He may be perfect, but he’s not my perfect partner, and that’s okay. Relationships are like shoes—you try them on, and they may be cute, but if they don’t fit, you get another pair.”
“Did you just compare Jon to shoes?” Jen asked, bewildered.
Sarah laughed.
“I thought I’d use an analogy that was near and dear to your heart so you’d understand.”
Jen let out a gusty, dramatic sigh before pulling the pizza box open, taking a slice in hand, and pointing it at Sarah.
“Fine. I still want to hear the whole story though.”
Sarah went through her entire day, from being fired to realizing she wasn’t really a good match for Jon, especially after seeing him with the redhead with the busty chest. At that part of the story, Jen had the good grace to gasp in shock.
“You think he was cheating on you? That monster! I’m ending our friendship this instant! I’ll never speak to him again!”
As Jen pulled out her phone, Sarah placed a hand on her friend’s, stopping her from starting drama, which tended to be one of her favorite pastimes.
“I am not saying he cheated on me. I’m just saying I could see that he had a connection with another woman, and I didn’t actually feel upset about it. That’s when I knew we really weren’t meant to be in a relationship. I definitely hope we stay friends, though.”
“Hmm,” Jen grunted, unconvinced.
She allowed her eyes to wander around the room until they landed on the little bottle.
“What’s that?” she asked, pointing to it.
Sarah took it in her hands, holding it delicately between her fingers. Then she looked up at her friend with an amused expression.
“Well, as if the day couldn’t get any weirder, I found a message in a bottle.”
Jen laughed.
“What, like that was bobbing along in the sea and you were the one who was chosen to find it?”
“Exactly,” Sarah said with a nod.
Jen swallowed her bite of pizza and reached for the bottle.
“I want to see! Is it a love note from a heartsick man far away? That’s how it is in all the movies!”
Sarah burst out laughing. She made Jen go wash and dry her hands before s
he gently knocked the letter back out and handed it to Jen to read.
“It’s hardly a love letter,” Sarah said. “The sender is a ten-year-old boy, and it’s a twenty-year-old note. Who knows what could have happened to him since then.”
“But that means he’s about our age,” Jen said, and Sarah nodded.
“Yes. Good math. What’s your point?”
“My point is, maybe you really were meant to find this so that you could go find the boy who grew into a man who might still be looking for love.”
“Is your main goal in life to see me married off?”
“Isn’t everyone’s?” Jen countered.
“Not everything in my life is about being with a man, Jen. I just got out of a mediocre relationship and a mediocre job. I’m not about to go gallivanting around the world, searching for some boy who wrote a note twenty years ago.”
“But how else is he going to know you found it? If I wrote a letter and tossed it into the sea, I would hope the nice person on the other end contacted me to let me know it had been found. How cool would that be? You could be soul mates and not even know it!”
“Or we could be friends. Or he could be gay. Or he could be…” Sarah didn’t want to say dead.
She didn’t want to believe that the little hand that had written those words had met with any other hardship. She wanted to believe that he and his mother had prospered and lived a happy and quiet life in the country, that he had made lots of friends and maybe fallen in love and had children already. She wanted Ali to be happy more than she could reasonably admit. She had a connection to him now. The universe had picked her.
“Whatever. I’m just saying this is weird. New topic. What are you going to do with your life now that you have no job?”
Sarah pretended to show interest in that topic, which was difficult, because she really didn’t want to think about the job-search process and how horrible that was going to be. It was hard enough to find work these days, but to find it in three months with only travel guide experience—a dying field?
It was daunting to say the least.
After another glass of wine, Jen finally made her exit, leaving Sarah to the quiet sanctuary of her apartment. She cleaned up the mess, carefully replacing Ali’s note in the bottle and putting the stopper back on before setting it on her bedside table.
Stepping into a hot shower, Sarah allowed herself to think about the day’s events on her own. Every time she questioned her decision to break it off with Jon, a voice in her heart chimed in that she actually didn’t really care. Sometimes she feared she had been with him simply because she didn’t want to be alone.
Drying off, she slid into a comfortable pair of pajamas before sliding into bed and plugging in her phone for the night. She turned off her bedside lamp, though living in the city meant that her room was never entirely dark, even with the blinds closed.
Because of this, the little bottle appeared to be glowing in the muted streaks of city light. Sarah stared at it. Her body was telling her it was exhausted, but her mind refused to comply. She imagined that miniscule little bottle floating around the world for twenty years, unbroken by tumultuous seas.
Sarah considered herself an analytical, logical person. Still, she couldn’t help but think about Jen’s words, about how that bottle had been meant for her. There was a part of her that knew that had to be true on some level.
Unable to sleep, she finally threw her comforter back and jumped from her bed, grabbing her laptop and heading back to the kitchen table, where she fired it up and began looking up information on Al Jayah. She discovered that the primary language was English due to long-term British colonization there, which helped explain why Ali’s note was written in English. She found the northern provinces Ali had talked about, though the country itself was microscopic, tucked away between two other Middle Eastern countries she had heard much more about.
Turning to social media, Sarah decided to begin her search there. She could find Ali, and she would reach out to him. Something inside her refused to do anything else.
FOUR
After digging through every possible social media site she could find, Sarah rubbed her eyes with the base of her palms. Her eyeballs felt like sandpaper, but her mind was buzzing, trying to come up with possible ways she could find Ali. When nothing presented itself, she found herself clicking over to a travel website and scanning flights.
After a moment, she jumped back, realizing what she was doing. Was she really booking a flight to Al Jayah, a country she knew almost nothing about, to find a man who could quite possibly be dead or long gone? She had nothing to go on, no clue as to where she might find him short of the general northern location he had mentioned.
What was she thinking?
She stared at the screen, which was glowing in the darkness of her silent apartment. A little voice crept in from the back of her mind, whispering the most dangerous of questions.
Why not?
She had the money. Thanks to Jon, she had worked to save and had compiled a good amount of funds, just like he had taught her to do. She reminded herself to thank him for that at some point. With no Jon and no job to think about, what was really holding her there? She was twenty-seven, and the world was her oyster, at least for a little while.
Sarah grinned, her face glowing in the light of the computer screen as she picked a flight and clicked through until she had to grab her credit card to make the payment. When she reached the final screen, her finger hovered over the submit button while she considered her actions one last time. Taking a breath, thinking about Ali and his loneliness and his plea for friendship, she pressed her finger down and solidified her fate.
Once it was done, she released a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding, and she smiled.
“I’m going to find you, Ali. And when I do, we are so going to get coffee.”
A wave of exhaustion washed over her then, and without a second thought Sarah shut down her computer and stumbled off to bed, collapsing onto her mattress as she haphazardly threw her comforter around her body. She imagined a pair of arms wrapped around her, though knowing Ali as a child, it seemed strange to imagine that they were his.
What did Ali look like now? Who could he be?
***
“You’re doing what?” Jen demanded, spitting out her coffee across the table.
Sarah reached for a couple of napkins and proceeded to clean the table of her friend’s spittle.
“You’re the one who said this was destiny,” she said, leaving the wet napkins at the edge of the table.
Jen’s eyes were bugging out of her face, which would have been amusing if she weren’t directing her usual drama in Sarah’s direction.
“Yeah, as a joke,” Jen said. “You can’t seriously be considering a flight to…whatever that place was called!”
“It’s called Al Jayah, and from what I’ve read, it’s a very beautiful country.”
“Sarah, you need to be looking for a job. Now is not the time to fall prey to delusions of grandeur. That guy has probably moved away, maybe to the city, maybe to another country. How many Ali’s are there in the world? Millions? Billions? With no last name to go on, you’re looking for a literal needle in a haystack!”
“That’s not entirely true,” Sarah said, her eyebrows narrowed.
Nothing Jen was saying was new to her. She’d had every single thought herself. She knew that what she was about to do was totally crazy. For some reason, that truth in no way dissuaded her from going anyway.
“I know he was sitting by a river when he wrote the letter, and he lived close enough to the capital city to have community members commute there for work. Using that information, I have a pretty good idea of where he was and where I might find him.”
Jen stared at her for a moment, considering her words. She held her coffee mug in front of her face so that only her eyes were visible, and they were narrowed in accusation.
“You’re just trying to get over Jon,
aren’t you? That’s what this is. Some people get a new haircut after a break up. You’re spending all your savings on a wild goose chase halfway across the world.”
“I’m not getting any younger, Jen. What if my time to have adventures is running out? What if I never leave this place and end up stuck in some office forever, planning trips for other people, wishing it was me who could go?”
Sarah sighed, sitting back in her chair, her eyes pleading.
“I don’t want that life. I’ve got to take a risk. I’ve never taken one this big before, and I’m excited! Can you please try to be excited for me, too?”
At her plea, Jen’s wall came down with her mug. She set it on the table before reaching a hand out to squeeze her friend’s.
