When I was nine or ten, and living in a different country, I once wrote the words, “To whoever finds this, I hope you are ok,” for a school assignment in which we’d been asked to compose a message, in ink, on a sheet of loose leaf paper, that we folded many times, into a square that was small enough to fit through the mouth of a bottle that we then corked and were told we could toss into the ocean, once we’d taken the bottles home with us, which I did, the following afternoon, though the tide was so strong, on the shore to which I’d brought mine, that the bottle kept returning to me, on the waves, instead of floating out to sea, where I’d hoped it would be carried, so that finally I left it there, on the sand, where I’d been standing, as if it had never been mine, and I’d had nothing to do with it.