Sea

When the boy was too young to even know he was a boy the wave that was
taller by half again than his dad (who, though the boy would never know this, was
considered quite tall) swept over the island and washed away everything, including the
boy.
Houses! Cattle! Dogs! Bicycles with patched tires and rusty chains! Fishing poles! Even
monkeys, all washed away in a frothing green wall of ocean that rose up and across
and over, and moved him (though he would not remember this) right out of his mother's
arm as she clung with one hand to him and with the other to the tree outside their house
(it was more of a hut than a house but, as the boy would never remember that nor have
any use for the words house, or hut, we may call it either).
Swoooooosh!
Craaaaaash!
Waaaaash!
Hooooooowl!
And the last sound was his mother, as her baby was torn from her arm, her wordless
scream encompassing all these emotions at once, emotions which are not capable of
being reduced to one word, but which are describable as:
The feeling a mother who dreamed for years of becoming a mother has when her only
child is washed from her arms by a tsunami...

...the feeling that same mother has when she wishes, suddenly, that she had held onto
her baby with two arms, so they would be washed out to sea together, at least and she
could protect him for an instant longer...

...the feeling that woman has when she realizes that she is going to let go of the tree,
but that it is already too late and her baby is far far away already...
...the feeling of letting go of the only thing around you that is not water...
the feeling of everything being water...
...the feeling, deep down inside one, that realizes letting go has been futile but knew not
letting go would feel the same as letting go but would last longer...
and the feeling of greenish yellow turbulence whipping away further and further above
one's head as the water turns darker. Colder, as the water stills and one's toes feel
colder calmer water yet further below, water that goes from green to deep green to blue
to black, cold and black and quiet.
The boy was not so far away at that point, and as he was tossed on a wave atop a
crest, the sun improbably shining happily brightly on a new sea where an old village had
sat, as he was moved away he saw (though he didn't know what he was seeing) his
mother sink below the waves.
Then he was spun and twisted and bounced up again, and he saw a monkey!
The he was flipped over and around and up again and he saw a bicycle tire and a tree
branch, entwined!
This went on for some time and he was upset by the upheavals, crying, his tiny voice
wailing into the screams of those around him (and the jabbers of the monkeys and the
howls of the dogs and the splashes of the dying), fading from the loud anger to choked
and waterlogged crying, dimmer and more hoarse, echoing off the slap of the waves on
the debris, and then even that died away and there was only the tiniest sounds of water
when it ran into a piece of something that used to be attached to the island where he
had lived, but which now was attached to the sea.
Where he lived.
It was late afternoon when the wave had hit but by the time things settled down, by the
time the boy bobbed up and down amidst all the water in the world having come to land
on a piece of a wall that used to be a house it was early evening and his throat was sore
and he had to be quiet, for now, although he was hungry and knew that soon he would
need to eat or he would cry again, but all the swishing and turning and tumbling and
sucking water into his small nose had tired him out and so he closed his eyes against
the red skies above him and he slept.
When he awoke, he would have cried but for the spectacle above him and around him:
above him was the universe, and this would be his constant companion from now on,
from this moment when he first opened his eyes on his new life until the final time he
closed them, everything that was (or at least everything that was visible, which to him
were the same things, from then on), was there with him.
And it was beautiful.
The stars!
All around him in the sky were star after star after star after star star star star star, and
though he had seen these before (over his mothers shoulder, or past the edge of the
roof outside the window) he had not seen them in such profusion and not blocked by
palm leaves or trunks or monkeys. And he had not seen them reflected in the glassy
stillness of the sea, its surface (perhaps exhausted after the upheavals of the day) calm
and smooth as glass (which he also had never seen) and reflective, doubling, tripling,
quadrupling the number of stars as the light flung back and forth and out and up and
down.
He did not cry.
He sat amidst all the other babies blessed with a journey, for that is what the light of the
stars was, babies like him. However old those stars may have actually been at the time,
they were new when they first sent out the glows that now turned the boys entire world
into a stunning universe of light, baby light flung out across the universe to land here on
the sea around the boy.
He did not cry.
In the morning he was awakened by the sun, which when he first opened his eyes was
so bright and large and incomprehensible that to anyone who knew of such things it
would have seemed the world had moved closer to the lifegiving star it flung itself about
continuously, but the enormity of the sun was not because it had somehow found a way
to pull this planet nearer, but instead because the water, which remained preternaturally
calm, reflected the sun more easily even than the stars and the effect was that the
entire ocean stretching off to the east appeared to be sun, rising and growing ever
more, and the boy again did not cry or feel upset, as he had no idea that it was in any
way wrong for him to be lying atop a floating wall in the middle of the vastest sea on the
planet.
He looked away from the sun then, at the sky above him fading from violet to blue to
black on the far side of the sea, although there were no stars there anymore and no
moon visible, and slowly the sun climbed up and up and up up up up to rise above him
until he began to feel hot, then hotter, then uncomfortable and he grew thirsty and the
time had long since passed for him to eat.
Life is miraculous, always. Sometimes it is not so obvious as it was for the boy, then,
but always the miracles are too numerous to count, around us like hidden butterflies
flapping their soft wings at every current of fate, stirring them up to keep us, in all our
improbabilities, alive yet another moment. How could we survive, ridiculous things that
we are, without constant and miraculous intervention? We could not.
Clouds came wisping up from the south, the wind curling them far above the boy while
barely brushing the ocean in a manner that made the gentlest, longest of waves slowly
undulate across the broad expanse, so that the boy was rocked softly as first tiny
streamers of moisture, then larger piles of it, then finally great rollicking billows of
droplets of water tumbling pell-mell over each other formed clouds so high their tops
could not be seen, and their bottoms blotted out the hottest of the sun and the rain fell,
steady and soft and warm and light, and the boy, lying on his back for so long, sat up
then and opened his mouth and the rain filled it up.
He swallowed, and smiled, and opened his mouth again, head tilted back and eyes
closed tightly, and the rain filled it up again. He swallowed again, and again, and when
he was no longer thirsty he laid back down, on his side, feeling the rain wash over him
and cleanse the dried salt off of him.
And so it went, night and day and night and day and night day night day night day, the
sun glowing down on him and warming him, the stars blanketing him in light at night,
rain coming often enough that he never felt too thirsty. From time to time small fish
would dart near the surface, that first day and thereafter, and at first he had watched
them interestedly and then he remembered his father catching fish and his mother
cooking fish. These memories, eventually, would fade, their brief time in his life being
replaced by endless happy and quiet days adrift in his new life, but that day they still
existed and using them he had tried to put his hand in the water to catch a fish, but
these little beings had been too quick, these darting specks in the top warmest part of
the water, seeming to laugh at him and smiling as he played tag with them, his body half
off the board that was his home now, and he had laughed back, feeling the fish brush
the back of his hand, but as he grew frustrated and hungrier, as his brain reached back
and remembered the smell of fish soup boiling above the iron stove his father had
bought from a ship one day (this, too, would eventually fade from his consciousness),
he started feeling the sadness in the back of his mind and his movements grew angrier,
his hand darting and splashing more harshly and then he slapped the surface of the sea
with palm in frustration, and the game stopped. He sat back on his legs, crouched, and
stared.
Three fish jumped out of the sea and onto the raft, flapping near his feet.
Later, full, he would lean over to the sea, and, not knowing the words to say for he
had heard words but had never spoken any yet himself and was not sure how tried to
make his face look thankful, instead.
And then, not knowing what else to do, he had pursed his lips and kissed the sea, as
quick and shy as a boy might kiss a mother after he felt he had grown old enough to
stop such childish things but not wanting to.
That night, the crescent moon looked to him like a smile beaming down on him as he
quietly drifted off to sleep.
For days and days and days weeks months he drifted like that. During his entire life he
never saw another person, never saw a boat on the horizon or land or trees, never saw
any other sign that there was anything in the world but the sea, if one did not count the
things that sometimes floated by him. One day, a wooden bucket drifted by, half-
swamped with sea water and he had reached out and grabbed it, and thereafter it would
catch and fill with rainwater and never be quite emptied. A sodden blanket dried out in
the noonday sun after he fished it from the water. He found driftwood and pulled it out
and dried it, built a frame and would drape the blanket over it during the day, so the sun
did not have to go hide to keep from burning him.
He ran his hands over the entire length of his home, over and over, getting to know
every crease and seam and nick and crack. At first, the raft was three of him long and
four of him wide, but then he worried it was shrinking because one day when he did it
again, the measuring, it was only two and a half of him long and three wide. When he
stood then, the edges of the sticks hed found and formed into a tripod didnt come up
as far as they could have and he understood that he was growing and not the raft
shrinking.
During the day sometimes now when it grew hot, he eased himself into the water, the
raft tipping a bit towards the edge he sat on as he dangled his feet, saw the little fish
darting around them and nipping at his toes, and then put his knees in and slid in
himself, staying near the top of the water, where the light made it green and then yellow
and then clear, not looking down farther, yet, because when it did the sea went from
dark green to blue to black and he could feel the cold from the depths, and did not like
that. He would go under water and up, keeping a hand on his home, watching the fish
swim up to his face and back away, smiling at them. He swam under the raft, watching
it with blurred vision under water, touching every part of it, getting to know it from below
as well as above, and back on top, he would lie on his stomach, feeling the top and
thinking down below here there is a notch in the board, and off over here is where that
dark patch is, until his skin grew hot and he went into the blanket-shelter again.
He started swimming at night, too, his favorite being when the sea was calm like that
first night and the stars were out, and he could dive into them and see their lights above
him on the water, reach up and touch them, and feel like he was touching the stars
themselves, and then when he climbed out he sat staring up at them, wondering how
they had gotten up into the sea up above him (for, not knowing better, he assumed that
there were two worlds, the one above and the one he lived on, and that the sun traveled
between the two of them, and he wondered if there was a little boy up in the world
above him.)
Sometimes, he dreamed of people holding him, and in those dreams he was tiny and
not able to swim and the people looked like him, but when he woke he dismissed these
as imaginings, for there were no other people around. There was just his home, and
him, and the sea, which gave him fish to eat and cooled him and provided him
sometimes with gifts when he had been particularly good.
One night, he was swimming in the dark. The stars were out but the waves were large
enough that the light did not reflect well, and the moon was gone again as it sometimes
was (and it should be pointed out that he did not call these things moon and stars and
sea; he did not call them anything, at all: they just were, but to tell his story we must use
words that he would not understand, were he listening to us), and he swam in the dark,
careful to keep a hand on the home so he would not drift away from it and lose it. He did
not doubt that the sea would take care of him, if that happened, but he liked the home
and did not want to leave it behind.
While he swam, he felt as though something were nearby and watching him and he
turned, around and around around around around without seeing anything, but the
feeling grew and grew and grew, and finally he climbed back out of the water and stood
atop the raft, staring around, feeling the board below him pitch and yaw. He put his
hands on his hips, and tried to look every where at once.
A giant crashing splash sent a breaker of a wave washing towards him and it lapped up
over the edge of the raft, wetting his feet in the warm night air and he looked at that
direction just in time as a giant whale (he did not know it was a whale, particularly, but
recognized that it was a kind of fish) came back down from its tidal leap into the sky,
and to the boy it looked as though the whale had not leapt out of the sea and fallen
back, but had been dropped from the world above to crash into his, and he wanted to
dive in and find this newcomer from the sea above and bring it back to the raft, show
him his things and play with him, but as he watched in the night the whale simply sank
below the waves and did not come back up, and eventually the boy fell asleep.
When he awoke, he saw something not far away from the raft, and the sun was bright,
the sky blue, the sea calm, so he dove in and swam to this thing and pulled it back with
him. It was about the size of the bucket, but flat and solid like the home itself, and he
pressed it and bent it a little and decided it had to dry out. He spent the day with the
new thing sitting off to the side in the sun, while he drank water and swam and caught
fish and ate them and fiddled with the tripod of sticks and the blanket and idly ran his
hands over the edge of the raft and stared up at some small clouds in the sky, and then
when the sun was starting to set he picked up the thing again, and felt it was dry.
He examined it. The front was white, and had shapes on it, things that were round and
square and angular, and he traced them with his fingers. He felt the edge of the thing
and with surprise saw that he could pull it apart, that it was two stiff things joined on one
edge and had many thinner things inside it. Each of the thinner things had shapes on it,
colors, patterns, in unusual arrays, and he stared at each of them in turn, wondering.
That night, in his imagination, in his dreams, he stared and stared at the new thing, at
each part of it, and the shapes on it formed and rose up into what we would recognize
as trees and cars and houses and animals, for it was a picture book hed found, a
childs book washed over some boat or dropped into some river and drifting around the
world, but he did not know what these things were pictures of, and his memory strove in
vain all night to remind him of the fleeting life he had been washed away from so long
before.
When he awoke, he spent time paging through the book again, in wonderment, that
such a thing might exist, and he assumed it was lost by the whale that had (to him)
fallen from the sky the night before, and he resolved to give it back to the whale if he
could find him, but surely until then it would not mind if he looked at these things? He
tried to imagine what these things were but could not, knowing them only in the
released wanderings of his mind when he slept, not remembering them when he woke.
It was longer than he could imagine, longer than he could think, that he spent this way,
months and months and months and years years years. He found another large board,
and some cords, and he managed to tie them together, and he found more sticks, made
a larger shelter, and day in and day out he paged through the book, and looked for the
whale, and wondered if he could get enough wood to build a ladder tall enough to go
high enough that he could jump to the whales world up above. Sometimes he
wondered if the whale had made it back to his home, or if the whales home above was
now empty, and his world had two things while the other had none.
He began to swim deeper and deeper, braving the deep green and even sometimes the
blue water, but each time something made him turn back before long, and he came up
slowly, feeling the water warm around him, grow less dense. His face had grown hair
on it, and that grew longer, as did the hair on his head, and he had to use a piece of the
cords hed found to pull it back out of his way.
He had begun humming to himself, and though he did not know this, the song he
hummed was the melody of the last song his mother had ever sung to him, before the
tsunami.
He would see the whale again one more time before he died, years years years from
the first time, and though you may say it was almost certainly not the same whale, it
actually was, but the boy would never have imagined there could be more than one
whale, anyway, as there was only one of him, so how could there be two of another
thing? He saw the whale again on a night that was as calm and quiet and mirrorlike as
the first night of this life, such conditions being infrequent enough that each time he
stayed awake as long as he could to enjoy them.
The night was still. He lay on his back, again, surrounded by stars, the air warm and his
body tired after the day. The book was next to him, faded and thumbed through and
creased where his fingers had dozens hundreds thousands of times traced over the
unfamiliar patterns, and he let the stars simply soak into his eyes from all around, the
night absolutely quiet, not even enough water stirring to lap at the edges of the raft,
when he heard a slight swish, and he rolled over onto his belly, staring off in the
direction of the sound.
A large, dark mound rose from the water. The boy, no longer a boy, stood, then, and
waved. He called, using sounds he could make but forming no words, his call a kind of
singsong melody of friendliness. He held up the book, and tried to get the whales
attention.
The whale sat silently, for a long time, and the boy held the book up to him, and the
whale swam silently closer, closer, closer closer closer. It came up to the edge of the
raft and the boy saw its eye, right next to him. He bent down and looked at it, right into
that large kind, mysterious alien eye. He held up the book, and the whale blinked.
The boy reached out his hand, and touched the whale. He felt how the skin was
rubbery, slick but not wet, how it felt warm and kind. He leaned on the whale, which did
not move. The boy put his other hand on it, and then, clutching the book, scrambled up
the whales side to stand atop it.
The whale then moved away from the raft. The boy was not afraid. He sat down and put
the book between his chest and the whale, hugged the whales back as it dove. He
clung with all his might to the whale as it dove down down down down down, and knew
the whale had gone all the way into the black water that the boy had never reached, and
when they got down that far, the boy closed his eyes against the dark and cold, hugged
the whale, feeling the book between him and the whale, and there in the darkness that
was more complete than any he had ever before known, he felt the sadness emanating
all around him.
Sadness. Sadness. Sadness sadness sadness, and he knew suddenly why he had
always been afraid to dive that deep, knew why he had feared the dark waters below
him.
Mom he whispered, the only word he would ever say in his life, spoken deep
underwater and inaudible. The water, at that depth, pressed in around him and pushed
on him and clutched to him and finally, hugged him as tightly as he had ever been or
ever would be held, and then let go, as always must happen.
The whale reversed course, abruptly swimming up with such vigor the boy almost let go
but he held on and the whale swam, swam, swam swam swam until it hit the surface of
the water and flew into the air, up, up, up up up and into the air, the boy falling away
from the whale and into the ocean, splashing his own miniscule eruption as the whales
torrential immersion enveloped him, and when the boy came up again he was floating
next to the raft, the book still clutched to his chest, his skin still remembering the cold,
tight embrace of the deep dark water, and he quickly climbed out of the water, laying on
the raft, chest heaving with excitement, staring up at the stars, which showed no change
from the adventure.
When he had caught his breath and cleared his head, he leaned over and stared at the
once-more calm sea, then leaned over and gave it a kiss before going to bed.