To survive, my people must return to the sea, but I’m afraid.  I’m afraid of water, not little water like you can hold in a cup, but big water. I’m afraid of drowning. I’m afraid of being entangled in the pale reaching arms of kelp. I’m afraid of the toothed mouths that can come at you from above or from below.

On dry land, things are at eye level. They don’t swoop down on you from the sky. Gaping maws don’t open underneath you. My eyes, the eyes of all my kind, face forward; our necks turn them freely from side to side. That’s enough, when we walk on the surface of the world.

But we must go back to the water every cycle, where mere front-facing vision isn’t enough. There, the world is not a surface; it’s a ball that wraps you round. And it’s dark. So I’m afraid.

I prolong my time on land until my eyes sting from the parching air. My lips dry in the sun and crack. My skin shrivels.

And then, afraid, I go to the shore, near the wading pools where we take our young. The parents look at me, but say nothing. It’s been many years that I’ve been coming to the shallows. I am an oddity that is no longer odd.

I make a show of playing with the babies, tumbling with them when the waves slosh over the tide-pools. I am a childless female, after all; isn’t it natural? But it’s not love of children that keeps me in the shallows.

I don’t know why I have this unnatural fear of the half of life that keeps us moist and fertile. I’ve been that way since I was a child myself. Perhaps all children—no, that’s not true. It is the child-herders, not fear, that keep the youngsters near the shore. Left to their own devices, they would dive deep and swim far, from infancy onwards.

I was different. Always, I swam in-shore from my parents. And when I went with the other children, I made sure that some of them were always further out than I. It’s shameful to say, but I wanted the sharks to get them first and let me live.

As we grew, my age-mates noticed that I didn’t dare the deeps. At first they teased me, then they mocked me, then they gave me up as broken. I was to be pitied, maybe, but not played with.

I learned to be alone, not just during the water-time but during the land-time too, for every land-time ends in return, and I felt the need to be as private as possible about the way I dipped and waded with our unfinished young instead of plunging into the waves with the others.

As the years passed, I lost all shame, or at least I lost the dream that my shame could be private. Everyone knew about me. There was nothing to hide, though I still craved hiddenness.

We need water-time or we die. We need land-time or we die. And I think, too, we need nesting-time, pressed together with our flock, or we die. But even ringed round with all these deaths, it is not easy to willfully end your life. It seemed to me, though, that the death that comes from being flock-starved is less definite, somehow less intentional, than drying or drowning. So this is the way I chose, if you can call it choosing.

One day, after my water-time, barely submerged with this year’s babies, I came out on land and just walked away. I went away from the squawking crowding of our nest-place, down the long beach, as I had done so many times before. But this time I did not turn back.

I walked until the sand became stone. I kept walking until the stone lifted me high above the surging sea. Little beach spangles grew in the cracks and strange tall plants laid down shadows across the path.

When the sun-high came, I rested under one of the leafy shades, for I was drying fast. Without turning back, I would die—not the long slow death of flock-hunger, after all, but the thirsty, cracking death of drying—for by now I was on a tall stone face so high above the water that I couldn’t even see the place below where the waves came to the land.

I crept to the edge on my belly and found the breakers below me, boiling against the rock with a fierceness I had never known even in the harshest storms of autumn. Each swell reared up like a living dune, then threw itself against the wall like it would break it down or die. I felt the shudder come to my body through the rock. Sea and land were at war here, either at war or in the heaves of mating.

Where the water was not milk-white with foam, it was deep-green, bottomless. There were no shallows here, no tide-pools for the young or afraid. I inched away from the edge and back into the kindly shade of the tree.

I was drying. My tongue was sticking in my mouth. My eyes and crotch were prickling with the urgent need for moisture. I realized I couldn’t make it back now to the safe shallows of my childhood, even if I tried. I could go forward for a little while, to some unknown place—maybe the stone would sink back toward the beach in time—or I could simply stay here, under this tree, until the air turned me to a leather doll and the big birds cleaned my bones.

I had stumbled on the way to die. I lay back to enjoy it.

The sky over the sea was blue. Air blue is different from water blue. It is the petal of a small flower, soft and dry and dainty, but spread wide beyond imagining. Water blue is more like an eye, deep and moist and shining. Only on gray days do the two run together so there is no line between them.

I thought, after a little, that I might walk on. Going a little further would make sure that when the hard thirst came I would not lose courage and crawl back—a shame to go to all this trouble and then not die indeed.

So I walked on, following the high stony eyebrow above the sea, admiring the sky and clouds and the plants (which were different here.) Every now and then, I was pulled back to the edge, worming my way out to peep over and see the terror below me: deep water rising, crashing, drawing back to strike again, to knock away the foundations and crumble the land.

As I grew drier and thirstier, looking out at the water began to distress me, so I walked on without stopping and began to think about a place to die. It would be more comfortable to die in the leafy shade, but quicker in the sun, and perhaps the quickest of all if I kept moving until I could go no further, for the breath and sweat of exertion would speed the change. (A bullying little voice in my head said, “But a shark would be even quicker.”)

So I thought about this for a while, instead of about the different kinds of blue, and I walked on.

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