Every now and again, a great white mistakes a surfboard’s outline for the shape of a seal. Perhaps it was the blood from a cut on the ankle which prompted it to take a bite; perhaps it was just the sun obscuring its already-poor eyesight. The water need not be murky.

The shark bursts to the surface in a flash of white and grey, the muzzle popping above the waves. Only a morsel of a bite is necessary to snap the brittle plastic in two—an arm, maybe a leg, was tooth-snagged by the way. After taking a taste, the great white finds the meal inexplicably unseal-like, and swims away in search of another meal.

In search of another meal…it’s the sort of thing you hear in documentaries. Not what you would think about when a flash of fin has left a life dangling in its wake, like a limb’s tenuous connection to the torso by a thin scrap of skin. Which is precisely the scrape my friend is in.

A heap of something was taken to the graveyard and buried in a hole. The shark took my friend, and a little later, a forsaken tooth is all we have left of the encounter. And a bizarre tendency to rhyme for no reason at all. Words can look like one another. A surfboard can look like a seal.

Survival in an environment hostile to life is a daily struggle. Somedays I end my school day retreating to my private space, beaten back by an atmosphere toxic to the soul. This little bubble of a world has students hallucinating, constantly thinking they need to prove themselves in one way or another, lest they find they are 'not good enough.' Some of my friends walk around with a permanent air of defeat already. They have given up on themselves. Others, a little higher on the evolutionary ladder, have adapted to suit the environment; they are the superme masters of this world. But, in some cases, they become as hostile as it is.