The thud of the coconut on my head was what woke me. I looked around me and a snake stared at me with eyes of death.
I jumped up frantically, and I started clambering up the nearest tree. A couple of minutes later I finally had a chance to understand my surroundings. Giant palm trees glared at me as if they were about to fall and crush me. The sea swayed rhythmically up and down and the dolphins danced in the scorching heat of the August sun. I could hear seagulls and other seabirds singing as they passed over the island. I slowly climbed down the tree and started walking deeper into the island. As I walked deeper and deeper into the island the smell of the sea became distant and all I could smell was the fresh mango that grew in the trees around me. As the sky became darker, I decided I needed to find a place to sleep for the night. I started building a shelter. Pieces of wood cut and splintered my skin. As I sat down to relax, I touched the wet soil and I got a shiver down my spine from the memories of that ‘wetness’.
At the start everything had been fine, I had never expected it would have ended up like this. The journey was from Liverpool to Jamaica, and I was so happy I could finally relax after a stressful year. On the tenth night of the journey, disaster struck! The waves were hitting our ship violently for three hours and a crack opened. Water broke through and in a few minutes the bottom deck of the ship was below water. There was panic and chaos on the deck and people were pushing people off just for them to get a rescue boat. A couple dozen of us remained on the deck and since there weren’t any more boats we jumped. The freezing water hit me with a blast and I frantically tried with all my power to stay afloat but failed. A few seconds later I fainted.
I woke up with a start; the dream I had had felt as if I was living it all over again. Suddenly, a helicopter appeared in the sky, coming closer and closer. I burst up so quickly that the tree behind me shuddered, knocking a coconut on my head, sending me back down unconscious…
