Migrations

by Charlotte McConaghy

Once, when the animals were going, really and truly and not just in warnings of dark futures but now, right now, in mass extinctions we could see and feel, I decided to follow a bird over an ocean. Maybe I was hoping it would lead me to where they’d all fled, all those of its kind, all the creatures we thought we’d killed. Maybe I thought I’d discover whatever cruel thing drove me to leave people and places and everything, always. Or maybe I was just hoping the bird’s final migration would show me a place to belong. Once, it was birds who gave birth to a fiercer me.

But a will is a powerful thing, and mine has been called terrible.

So I stayed and stayed, until one day I couldn’t stay any longer. I was made of a different kind of thing.

I was taken from my mother’s home and sent back to Australia to live with my paternal grandmother. I didn’t see the point in staying in any one place after that. I only ever tried once more, many years later when I met a man called Niall Lynch and we loved each other with brands to our names and bodies and souls. I tried for Niall, like I did for my mother. I really did. But the rhythms of the sea’s tides are the only things we humans have not yet destroyed.

The Arctic tern has the longest migration of any animal. It flies from the Arctic all the way to the Antarctic, and then back again within a year. This is an extraordinarily long flight for a bird its size. And because the terns live to be thirty or so, the distance they will travel over the course of their lives is the equivalent of flying to the moon and back three times.”

There are no more monkeys in the wild, no chimps or apes or gorillas, nor indeed any animal that once lived in rain forests. The big cats of the savannas haven’t been seen in years, nor have any of the exotic creatures we once went on safari to glimpse. There are no bears in the once-frozen north, or reptiles in the too-hot south, and the last known wolf in the world died in captivity last winter. There is hardly anything wild left, and this is a fate we are, all of us, intimately aware of.

Mam used to tell me to look for the clues. “The clues to what?” I asked the first time. “To life. They’re hidden everywhere.” I’ve been looking for them ever since, and they have led me here, to the boat I will spend the rest of my life aboard. Because one way or another, when I reach Antarctica and my migration is finished, I have decided to die.

“What makes a young thing like you so tired of life?”

It’s not life I’m tired of, with its astonishing ocean currents and layers of ice and all the delicate feathers that make up a wing. It’s myself.

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 life has been a migration without a destination, and that in itself is senseless. I leave for no reason, just to be moving, and it breaks my heart a thousand times, a million.

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

I think sometimes I’m conditioned for destruction.”

“There’s a difference between wandering and leaving. In truth, you’ve never once left me.”

Before my wife was my wife, she was a creature I studied. Now, this very morning, her fingers were splayed over the lump by her belly button, the elbow or fist or foot pressing itself toward us, wriggling to the sound of my voice, reaching to be closer. It moved, this tiny person, and Franny’s eyes shone a light so bright as she looked at me, looked in astonishment, in fear and in joy. She loves this child, and it’s her cage. I think she only agreed to keep it because she wanted me to be left with something when she breaks free. The thing that calls to her, whatever it is, will call again. But she has forgotten my promise. I wait, always. Our daughter will wait with me. And maybe one day she too will leave, off on an adventure. And then I will wait for her, too.

I will take a piece of you with me, Mam. You stole the breath from your own body just as I am doing. You gave me books and poetry and the will to see the world and for that I owe you everything. I’ll take the sound of the wind keening through our little wooden hut, and the smell of your salty hair and the warmth of you pressed around me. I will take a piece of you, too, Grandma, for you gave me quiet and you gave me strength, and I’m so sorry I didn’t recognize them sooner. I’ll take some of you, John, I’ll take the photo you kept on your mantel, and all the love you left inside it, waiting there long after they were gone. I’ll take each of the gifts the crows brought me, each of the treasures. I’ll take the sea with me, deep in my bones, its tides making their way through my soul. And I’ll take the feel of my daughter in my belly, I’ll take all of her, and keep her always. But I need take nothing from you, Niall, my love. I’d rather give you something. The nature of me. The wilderness inside. They are yours.