Migrations

by Charlotte McConaghy

There are two worlds. One is made of water and earth, of rock and minerals. It has a core, a mantle and a crust, and oxygen for breathing. The other is made of fear.

it’s simply remembering what it feels like to love creatures that aren’t human. A nameless sadness, the fading away of the birds. The fading away of the animals. How lonely it will be here, when it’s just us.

My eyes graze his binoculars and without a word he passes them over. And like that the birds are no longer smudges, but elegantly detailed and purposeful and real. They steal my breath as they always do, these creatures who think nothing of having wings.

Isn’t that the way of all migrations? Poverty or war.

“Where’s your place, Franny?” Basil asks me again, and I think, Why would I ever tell you, and then I kiss him. Because I don’t like him even a little and it feels destructive.

We are, all of us, given such a brief moment of time together, it hardly seems fair. But it’s precious, and maybe it’s enough, and maybe it’s right that our bodies dissolve into the earth, giving our energy back to it, feeding the little creatures in the ground and giving nutrients to the soil, and maybe it’s right that our consciousness rests. The thought is peaceful.

A life’s impact can be measured by what it gives and what it leaves behind, but it can also be measured by what it steals from the world.

The world of fear. My new home. Fear that I won’t survive this, fear that I will.

I bury my feet and hands, feeling the coarse grains against my skin, and I beg myself to live inside this evening, but I am a million miles away. Once I would have lived for the sweetness of this night, I would have devoured it and let it quicken my blood, and now there is nothing. I am separate, and that might as well be death anyway.

I never worked out how to be relied upon and also free.

I’m not meant to be homesick, I’m not meant to long for the things I have always been so desperate to leave.

It isn’t fair to be the kind of creature who is able to love but unable to stay.

It has been decided by our leaders that economic growth is more important. That the extinction crisis is an acceptable trade for their greed.”

“Don’t apologize too much, kid. It’ll bleed you dry.” “What if you’ve a lot to apologize for?” “Once is enough for anything.”

He said our lives mean nothing except as a cycle of regeneration, that we are incomprehensibly brief sparks, just as the animals are, that we are no more important than they are, no more worthy of life than any living creature. That in our self-importance, in our search for meaning, we have forgotten how to share the planet that gave us life.

I’ve found my way to Yellowstone, to one of the last pine forests. It is an empty place now, not as it once was. The deer have all died. The bears and wolves went long ago, already too few to survive the inevitable. Nothing will survive this, Niall says. Not at the current rate of change. There is no birdsong as I walk among the trees and it is catastrophically wrong. I regret coming here, to where it should be more alive than anywhere. Instead it is a graveyard.

What happens when the last of the terns die? Nothing will ever be as brave again.”

I can’t help but think no animal, ever, should live in a cage. It’s only humans who deserve that fate.

So—for my own sanity—I release the Arctic terns from the burden of surviving what they shouldn’t have to, and I bid them goodbye.