Song for a Whale

by Lynne Kelly

Some people have the kind of confidence that lets them get away with being clueless.

He sang his message, struggling to match the sounds of the whales around him. But the sea grabbed his song and dragged it away, too high for the others to reach.

Sometimes I’d think of something to tell him, before remembering he wasn’t there to answer me. Then I felt bad for forgetting. Shouldn’t I always feel it? Missing him?

Sometimes she had too much of a drizzly November in her soul and had to get to the sea.

Maybe he just likes to sing, and it doesn’t matter that it’s an unusual song. A lot of people think that Blue 55 is lonely. But I wonder, do we believe that because we’re the ones who are lonely?

He swam into the rough waters, bellowing his unheard songs into the void of the ocean. Maybe the churning and the pounding and the rolling water that carried his sounds away would rearrange them into a new composition another would hear.

People who were desperate to communicate always found a way.

He hugged me then. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d hugged, if ever. Maybe when we were little kids. I wanted to tell him that wasn’t a dumb idea at all, but to do that I’d have to let go of him.

It was so delicious, I wondered if airport food was really that good or if everything tasted better because of the trip we were about to take.

The depths were emptier, darker, quieter. Yet less lonely, because there was no one to answer his calls with silence.

the memory of the glaciers was so strong, the sunlight couldn’t get through it.

So many ways to fail, all right in front of me.

“Beautiful and sad at the same time.”

“Time and distance smooth out the memory of what was lost.”

I was on a ship sailing over the ocean. Not a bad place to remarkably fail.

It wasn’t the kind of cry that was for one thing, but the kind that brings up everything sad or unfair that ever happened.

She was the kind who would take your hand and join you on an adventure, who had to break free like those bubbles trapped under the glacial ice.

Your music sailed through the ocean and over the land and carried me here. Sing your song. I will never write down the poem. It belonged to this whale, and I’ll leave it here in the sea, where it will live in the space above and below and all around him.

“Grandpa would want me to do for myself what I did for the whale.”

‘It is not down on any map; true places never are.’ Where we traveled together isn’t on any map, and I’ll get to keep it with me all the time.”