Suggested Listening: Ólafur Arnalds – Not Alone
https://youtu.be/IBUYLedYods
Inspired by one of my own images.
It was lonely in the dark of the cavern. The silence haunted me.
Oh, how I longed to sing with my family again. I tried to sing once, alone though I was. It wasn’t the same. My voice couldn’t reach the heights of the dolphins, nor the depths of the whale’s hum.
Somewhere beyond this watery pit I could hear them for a time. I heard their playful cries as the sun skipped over the Surface and glittered on their scales. Eventually their singing became more distant. We all accepted my fate. They murmured lullabies into the craggy spaces of the collapsed wall, but it turned to mourning and that faded to deafening silence.
I could see the Above from my prison, in all the hues of deep blue, and taste the scent of the breeze that blew over Land. I waited for the whole moon to visit on clear evenings when the world was calm.
Shaggy Four Legs would appear at the cliffs and join in their own chorus of howled prayers. The voices were different but as earnest as any whale’s, and as beautiful as my mother’s. That used to excite me, but all new things lost their charm when my cave crumbled into a dungeon with no way out.
I went to sing to the Two Legs, the ones that appeared on days when the tide was low. The Surface was warm with the embrace of summer, and my flesh ached to feel some kind of comfort.
The first Two Legs that I ever saw smiled at me. She was beautiful, with streaming black tendrils and an umber, scale-less body. She sat at the edge of the sea with me, kicking her two legs over rocks like a stunted jellyfish. I couldn’t help but stare at her webless appendages and wonder… could such a creature swim with no fins or gills?
So I took her. Grabbed her by the smooth flesh of her wrist and stole under into my saltwater world.
She didn’t understand. She kicked and screamed, swallowing the sea instead of breathing it. I tried to tell her, but her face contorted into terror to look at me. Her soft long claws tore at the walls of the cave, grasping nothing but slick mussels.
I took her deeper, tried to show her the wonders of Below. Her webless hand went slack as I pulled her along, and her terror lessened, so I thought. When I turned back to her there was no life in her body. She no longer kicked or smiled or laughed. She no longer did anything.
Two Legs cannot breathe the sea.
I took her back to the Above where she belonged and left her on a bed of kelp. I have never returned to the Surface.
I drift alone now, singing with my ear to the walls of my confines. Here I will stay, hoping against hope to hear one of my own kind.