whales and dolphins
i keep wondering what lives in the deepest parts of the ocean.
we have mapped the moon more carefully than we have mapped the ocean floor. that fact stays with me. it makes me think there are places on this planet still deciding whether we are ready to meet them.
when i was a kid, aquariums terrified me because i could not stop imagining the glass breaking and the water rushing toward me while i tried to find a way out.
sometimes i think about the billionaires who tried to descend there and never returned. people say it was mechanical failure. maybe it was. and still, that explanation feels too small for the depth they entered. the ocean is older than our machines. older than our ambitions. i imagine the deep recognizing intrusion before language ever arrives for it.
i imagine turtles older than our maps moving slowly across the seabed. i imagine creatures that recognize pressure and vibration the way we recognize language. i imagine the ocean noticing who arrives without relationship.
whales sing in ways we still cannot translate. their voices travel farther than anything we build to speak across distance. sometimes i wonder if their songs are maps. sometimes i wonder if they are warnings. sometimes i wonder if they are instructions for how to stay alive together in a changing world.
i wonder what they say to each other about plastic. i wonder how they speak about ships. i wonder how they prepare their young to inherit water humans keep altering without permission.
i wonder if they gather their babies close at night and speak to them the way we do when we are afraid of losing someone we love.
i wonder whether they carry worry the way we do. whether they measure survival in currency or schedules or ownership. i suspect survival for them depends on staying close enough to hear each other.
when we lived in hawaii, my father threw six-year-old me into waianae beach before i knew how to swim. the ocean threw me back out and i ran to my umma.
sometimes i think humans once lived closer to that kind of knowing.
i imagine there was a separation long ago. some people stayed near the water. some people walked farther inland. maybe the ones who stayed learned to move with current and weather and each other. maybe the ones who walked away learned to survive through distance and control.
maybe distance from water became distance from relationship.
maybe survival shifted shape slowly enough that no one noticed it becoming inheritance.
people hardened themselves against climates that demanded endurance. tools became extensions of survival. then some of those tools became weapons. then the weapons became identity.
sometimes i wonder when we began confusing domination for intelligence.
even thinking in terms of food chains feels like a kind of forgetting. as if life exists to rank itself instead of sustain itself.
and still, the whales keep singing.
they keep carrying sound across impossible distances.
they keep returning to each other.
sometimes i think that is why whales break boats now. as if the ocean has its own thresholds for what it will continue absorbing without response.
sometimes i imagine the ocean remembering itself through them.
i want to meet a dolphin someday. or a manatee. i want to float beside them without needing to translate anything. i want to know what it feels like to share water with another mind that never agreed to live inside our systems.
