They say it takes two weeks to go completely insane when you're lost at sea, and, first of all, I don't believe people who say that, at least not without several addendums. There are probably a lot of pre-existing conditions to take into account, like how much food and shelter you have, or how bad the weather is. Maybe the guy had a condition before he got lost at sea; who knows? Maybe he was already insane. All I'm saying is, you can't believe the first result that comes up on Google when all you type into search bar is "How long does it take to go insane at sea?" Insanity, I think, is a natural defense mechanism that all humans have when shit becomes too much for them to deal with. Like, it's just a mode that your mind goes into, a protective shell of fantasy to shield your most important organ from completely shutting down, which leaves your body on autopilot. The trick is figuring out how to signal your mind that the danger has passed so it can take the stick again. I think I lasted about a week. Never was much of an endurance guy. Ken might have lasted longer. His dad's yacht was expensive, but pretty damn fragile. Personally, I think it could have done with two or three fewer Jacuzzi tubs, maybe used a few more life vests and emergency MREs. When Ken and I started sorting out our supplies on the grimy rubber floor of our life raft, and the slow realization of how screwed we really are starts closing over each of us, and he makes a kind of weak laugh that says pretty much everything that hasn't been said at this point. "If by some miracle we survive this, my dad's gonna kill me," he says. Even though I'm crying, I'm also kind of laughing, because I know how much of an asshole Ken's dad is. He's a stock broker, which says pretty much everything about Ken's dad that hasn't been said at this point. I say, "What if we end up like the guys in 'The Edge,' and, like, we start spilling our guts to each other, and get at each other's throats for something we said we did in the past. Then one of us starts digging pit traps and shit for the other guy to fall into." Ken shrugs. "Digging's gonna be hard on a rubber raft," he replies. "More likely we'll end up like Tom whatsisface from 'Castaway.'" "Hanks," I say. "What?" says Ken. "Tom [i]Hanks.[/i]" "Yeah, like Tom Hanks. Drawing faces on volleyballs, growing out our beards..." "We'll have to draw on something other than volleyballs, like our asses," I muse, pretty much done with crying at this point. I still hadn't fully accepted our situation, but I [i]had[/i] accepted that crying wouldn't do jack to help. "Your ass is too ugly to put a face on," Ken tells me. "I'll draw a face on your ass and call it Maddison. Then I'll take it to London, and buy it expensive clothes that it can spill wine on." "God, we're already living 'The Edge,' aren't we." He bitched so much about that after he and Maddison came back from the UK. I thought it was the funniest thing ever because I have no problem being a prick whenever Ken's waving his family's wealth and his supermodel girlfriend in my face. Those were like the silver spoon prima-donnas in high school who bemoaned the fact that everybody wanted favors from them because they had a lot of money, and yes, that was basically true, but you didn't need to throw the humble brag into the picture. Only favor ever asked of me growing up was if I could spare a cigarette or a lighter, usually both. Ken's wealth and my lower-middle-class poverty became our joke while we were stranded at sea, because, let's face it: we were both sharing the same life raft. The first few nights were the roughest because of how much we had to adjust to our new life as castaways (In retrospect, things definitely got a lot worse, but after enough bad things happen, it all starts to have the same, bland flavor). We decided we'd take shifts to keep an eye out for passing ships during the night so one of us would always be awake to shoot up a signal flare. Thank Tap-Dancing Christ the raft came with an emergency bag with first aid, a little survival food, four bottles of fresh water, some flares, and a flare gun. Other than that, we pretty much had to make do with the clothes we were wearing and whatever we happened to have on our person when the yacht capsized, and I can tell you first-hand that Candy Crush goes a long way to stalling out insanity. Be sure to mentally prepare yourself for that harrowing moment when your phone flickers the "Low Battery" message. That's like your doctor telling you that you've got terminal cancer. Even if you had a phone with an infinite battery life, cabin fever sets in eventually. "We should build a sail," I say on the third day. Might have been a Wednesday, but who cares. At least I didn't have to take my shift at Dairy Queen. "What for?" he says. "Dunno...catch the wind? We're just kind of drifting out here right now, might not be moving anywhere at all. I think I've seen castaways build sails for their rafts in movies before, using their T-shirts or something." "I think I'd rather keep my shirt." "Is it expensive?" "Don't be a dick. But, since you asked, yes. It's expensive." Every so often the bottom of our raft fills up with warm bilge water that smells like salt and dead fish, and our wrinkly asses have been marinating in it for hours. We found one of those collapsible cups in the emergency bag, so we use that to bail us out. "Yeah, I don't know how much good a sail would do us," I say as I bail. "Who's to say the wind would even take us the right way?" "If we're going to build anything," says Ken, "it should be a way to catch fish, since that's all we'll have to eat once the MREs are gone." "I mean, that won't matter when we run out of water. Are we running out of water faster than food?" "Yeah, I think so." "Figures." "Fuck." "Yep." "Maybe I should just drown myself now and save time." "[i]Now[/i] who's being a dick?" Of course we'd thought about killing ourselves, but there were much easier ways to go about it than drowning. Technically, drowning was the cleanest way, but neither of us much liked the thought of drowning. I'd had a deep-seated fear of water since an incident back when I was ten years old. I remember swimming out into the river, hearing my mom yelling that I'd gone out too far, then the current grabs me and drags me a mile downstream, and it takes somebody nearly an hour to finally find me, huddled up in a miserable sobbing ball on the shore. Took me years to go anywhere near water after that. But back to the suicide thing. We'd decided that, firstly, it would be an asshole move for one of us to do it, leaving the other to quietly lose his mind on his own. So we made a pact that we'd both agree to do it together, if at all. The second thing is actually something else the emergency bag contained that I failed to mention before: a multitool. Besides a toothpick, screwdrivers, and a tiny pair of scissors, the multitool also had a small knife blade. We discussed whether the best way to bleed out would be to cut across the wrist, or go straight for the throat. Also, I think we both knew the correct answer, but we'd use any excuse for discussion at that point. "Wrists. Definitely," Ken tells me on Day Five. "I disagree," I croak through cracked lips. By now, I've learned that the sun is a stupid ball of seething yellow hatred that's intent on vaporizing the entire planet, starting with my face. "Why do you disagree?" asks Ken. "You know damn well why," I say. "Has anybody ever tried going right for the brain? Like, through their eye or something." I shrug. "Bet'cha somebody was crazy enough to try it. Maybe they even pulled it off." "Do you think you'd ever use the toothpick?" "Right now, I wouldn't care if all my teeth fell out. My face hurts." "No, I mean for suicide." "Oh. Hell no. I'd rather drown." I think I've made it sound like we gave up too early with all our talks about suicide. That's partially true, because at some point we'd accepted that it was highly unlikely that we'd stumble into another boat out here, and didn't put much effort into sustaining ourselves beyond the water and food in the emergency bag. Maybe if our combined knowledge of survival consisted of more than the movies we'd seen on the subject, we would have put more gusto into it (by the way, we didn't actually draw faces on our asses). That's the other thing about being stranded at sea; you develop a grim sense of humor. Maybe it was ironic that this had actually happened to the two of us, who'd been friends since elementary school, now finally ending their lives together at roughly the same time, in the same rubber life raft. It may not sound like the funniest thing when I say it like that, but trust me when I say that shit was hilarious. You know how they always say the universe has a funny sense of humor. I don't think those people really get it until they've been the brunt of the joke for seven days solid. "Nah, Maddison wouldn't care that I died," Ken says on Day Six. "Like, maybe she'd cry a little bit just to keep up appearances. She'd fuck another guy in the middle of my funeral." "Dude," I say. "That's pretty messed up. I'd [i]never[/i] do that to you." "Do what? Fuck another guy?" We laugh. Our laughs sound more like brays from a pair of elderly donkeys. "I'd never hurt you like that, man. Why would you even date a girl you know would turn her back on you?" He shrugs, which is a bullshit answer. I press him further. "Do you think it's possible for a guy like you to get an honest girl? One who isn't just after your money?" He scowls at me. I can tell it's a scowl because he furrows his brow a bit. It hurts our sunburnt faces to make our expressions too severe. It also requires too much energy. "You make it sound like that's the only thing they go for." "Isn't it? It ain't your looks." "Shut up," he says after a tense pause. He rolls over on his side, facing the wall of the raft. "I'm just messing with you," I tell him, and lower my head. "Maybe I went a bit too far." "No such thing as 'too far' anymore," he says, sighing. "I could say the same about you; the only reason girls are attracted to you is because they feel sorry for you." I let this sink in for a minute, letting an angry fantasy flash through my head. "Let's stop talking about girls," I suggest. We stop talking about girls for a little while, but the topic resurfaces intermittently. Picture what goes through the mind of a man who hasn't had a good meal in five days. He's seeing New York Steaks, cheeseburgers stacked with thick beef patties, pies and cakes, like he's got an eight hour infomercial about food playing in his brain. Now picture what goes through the mind of a man who hasn't had sex in five years. It's not difficult to replace those images of food with...something else. Like I mentioned before, I only lasted a week before going nuts. I even remember warning Ken, "I think I'm going nuts," and he responded with, "Who isn't?" like some pretentious douchebag, so I told him, "No, seriously. I think I might have just gone out of my mind." I don't remember what he said after that. It might have been something insensitive, or he might have laughed. It's difficult to explain what it's like to go insane, I think because it feels so natural when it happens. When I was growing up, we had this screen door at the back of our house that had a lovely view of the aqueduct and the scenic rear-end of a Khol's superstore. That screen door used to squeak all the time, day in and god-forsaken day out whenever a slight breeze passed by. My bedroom was right next to it, so I would hear it all the time. Lost a lot of sleep to that fucking screen door. But, one day, I just didn't notice it anymore. I'd gotten so used to it that it was natural, yet whenever we had guests over to our house, I'd hear them complain about the screen door, and I'd say, "What [i]about[/i] the screen door?" then they'd clarify that it was squeaking, and ask when was the last time we'd oiled the hinges. Squeaky screen doors had apparently not entered their realm of normality. I must have started welcoming all kinds of things into my realm of normality. The waves constantly undulating beneath me was normal. My skin cracking under the hot sun was normal. Extreme hunger and thirst, both normal. Contemplating suicide was routine. Forgetting entire days was just another day at the office. This cycle must have continued until something outside my realm of normality barged in. The ship that found us was an oil tanker on its way out from San Francisco. They said I was on the brink of death when they found me. I'd been drifting at sea for seventeen days. Oh, and Ken, as you've probably already assumed, died. In fact, he'd died on the first day from severe head trauma. The police asked me why I hadn't thrown his body overboard. All I could do was shrug, which was a bullshit response.