message in a bottle.

Aashna Pant
7 min readJan 21, 2020
Photo by Scott Van Hoy

The story starts with a message in a bottle, an old-time convention when pirates ruled the sea. But now when bottles travel up from the waves, who is to say, what will emerge from underneath?

Trapped within borders, a girl sits and dreams; about the people and places, stuck in other isles across the sea. Since the day she was born, she knew she couldn’t leave, she had no idea how or the reason behind this decree. It was called New York, the world they knew, too large for their people and too grand for tomorrow. Through technology advancements and fashion renewals, her secret mound of electronic scraps had grown even taller, through years of collection, bargaining and barter. She planned that one day, she would escape the grey towers and find the colours in a forest, untamed.

However, during the history of their nation, rumours had started to circulate on why they were here and ways to get out. They apparently held memories of another world, where the scattered mounds of dirt conjoined their jagged edges. Though nothing was wrong about this great city of theirs, there was just a problem with the bubble surrounding its borders. Not visible to the eye nor could it be felt, but each item that was flung out into the open never strayed beyond a certain quantified distance.

But a child would not listen to stories of isolation, so her hope trickled higher, as each…

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Aashna Pant

a poet. a writer. or at least I like to call myself that.