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fire from scratch without problems, so I take on that task and make sure I build a signal fire every day. Mostly because it keeps me occupied, because I soon lose hope that it will attract rescuers. If Tristan shares my opinion, he doesn't voice it, nor does he make any attempt to stop me.
    During our first week, our top priority is searching for familiar plants and fruit. We stumble upon a tree Tristan recognizes: the andiroba tree—the Brazilian mahogany. Tristan claims it's used to treat insect and spider bites. I vaguely recall standing in a pharmacy smelling like a bouquet of freesias in Manaus with Chris and looking at anti-insect creams. Some of them had the andiroba tree drawn on them. The other thing I know about the tree is that most of the furniture in Chris's ranch is made out of it. Since no parts of the tree are digestible, as far as we know, we don't inspect it further.
    We don’t find any other familiar plants or fruit, so we resort to trying out new ones. I become an excellent monkey spy. At first I watch them from below, then I gather the courage to climb higher in the trees and watch them from there. That's how I discover that high up the trees all sorts of wonders await. Edible wonders. Like eggs and fruit. After my discovery, I start searching for eggs every day, though I don’t manage to walk very long distances. The tendrils of heat and humidity pirouetting in the dense air have an exhausting effect on me. We start gorging on the colorful assembly of fruits the monkeys eat. Tristan insists we perform the edibility test on every single new fruit (I managed to convince him to take turns in testing the food), but I don't complain. That's how we discover one of the fruits is not fit for human consumption, despite the monkeys eating it by the bucketful. I was the one testing it, and I had an upset stomach for two days—an experience made doubly dreadful by the fact that nature is our bathroom. Tristan's testing everything himself now. Thanks to his excellent knife skill, we have a meat meal almost every other day. We use the shell of a fruit as a container to boil the eggs. The shell is as hard as stone, and relatively fireproof. Tristan made more skewers from salvaged wreckage to roast the meat.
    I knew Tristan wasn’t much of a talker, but since it’s just the two of us here, I thought he might open up a bit, that he would need to talk. I know I do. But Tristan meets all my attempts at making conversation with monosyllabic answers. He's more talkative when he explains how to do a particular task. So I do most of the talking. I talk about home a lot, but mostly about the wedding.
    “I think I may have crossed the line with having twelve bridesmaids,” I tell him one day, while we roast a bird. “But every time I tried to take one of the girls off the list, I felt incredibly guilty.” Tristan frowns, a sign that bridesmaid talk isn’t really something he wants to listen to. So I talk about the music. The cake. At some point I realize all the wedding talk makes him uncomfortable. I guess I should have expected it… this is a beloved topic with women, not really a winner with men. Chris himself phased out whenever I talked more than half an hour straight about the wedding. So I resort to talking about home.
    “I miss the beach,” I say on another occasion, while we search for wood. “Sometimes after work I went to the beach and took long walks on my own. The sound of waves was so relaxing.” I stop because talking and carrying an armful of wood at the same time is too much effort.
    Survival keeps us so busy I have no time during the day to feel sorry about our situation or ponder over how much I fear that we will never be found. But when the dark sets in, things change. We go inside the plane almost the second the sun sets, because the mosquitos are such pests. We use the insect repellent wipes in our survival supplies sparingly. They don’t seem very effective anyway. With the diseases