Depths

Sunlight bore through the glass bottle, flooding it in green light. The sea lapped around it, and I was inside riding on a whisper, a feeble breath, put there by a child.

The child belonged to a mother who knew the taste of her soul. She knew the movements of the stars and every plant that grew when the time was right, but she also had ice in her heart. The child was bright. She had pale copper curls and eyes like the backside of the moon. They reflected something you couldn't see, not even if you tried. If you try to try, you'll never see anything. She knew that her mother was not of who she was born.

This child could think of only one thing 'Where do I come from, where do I belong?' And when she was old enough to speak, she picked a bottle from the shore, held it to her lips, and breathed into it. She stoppered it tight, and I was born, a question seeking its answer. Then she threw me into the ocean to find my other half so that, one day, she might come home to rest.

At first, I drifted out to the parts of the water that no one can see from the land, and I asked everything I could see 'where do you come from, where do you belong?' Because if they could say then maybe I could say the same. But the sky had no answer, the clouds just laughed, the creatures that found me just turned in the opposite direction, and the sea just sighed.

Then, one night, the water beneath me began the churn. Its soft sighs became steely, and the clouds above it grew thick and fast. The waves pulled themselves upwards as if they could catch the sky, but before they could snatch it, they'd curl downwards and die, painfully, at their own feet. The storm crashed into itself, over and over again. The sky sent cracks of white light to chase the waves, and I was flung between them, helpless.

Finally, the sea slammed me with such force that the bottle broke, and the shattered glass sprayed into the gloomy dawn. But I was ripped underwater. Down and down I went. Everything changed into bleaker shades, darker and darker until it was black. I cried, 'Where do I come from, where do I belong?'

But the darkness grew deeper and deeper until it couldn't be dark anymore. One thousand tiny lights popped into being all at the same time. I thought wildly of stars, but that couldn't be right. Could the above be so below? But before I could look closer, I was sucked in and swallowed by a gigantic shape, and I knew no more of darkness and lights.

I opened my eyes, for I had them now. The first thing I saw was sunshine flowing through the shallow sea. It hit my head, my fins, and my magnificent tail. I knew that I was no longer just a whisper. I was part of some beast. I broke the sea's surface and gasped in the salt air. Then back down below, and I knew something unknown.

I opened my mouth and sang out into the abyss, 'I know where I come from, I know where I belong.' They were no longer words but sounds, sad and yet joyful, low and yet high. I knew I'd be stolen and made into a child, but now I'd returned, and I knew what I'd re-become.

I am whale song.