Migrations

by Charlotte McConaghy

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.

“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”

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.

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.

“This ocean that’s tossing us about?” I say. “She wasn’t here sixty million years ago, but the earth moved enough to make her and now she’s more boisterous than most. More stubborn. That last bit wasn’t from a book. Samuel told me.” I let my eyes drift shut as I speak. “We don’t know her at all, really, or what she holds in her depths. We’re the only planet that has oceans. In all the known universe, we’re the only one sitting in the perfect spot for them, not too hot and not too cold, and it’s the only reason we’re alive, because it’s the ocean that creates the oxygen we need to breathe. It’s a miracle we’re here at all, when you think about it like that.”

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.

“They have the longest migration of any animal in the world, from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back again.” “And you follow

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

“Boredom’s for the boring.”

“Things don’t always take the shape you want them to, kid, and we gotta learn to endure that with a bit of grace.”

But panic is an enemy. Any emotion at all can be an undoing. Slow your breaths, deepen them, time them to a metronome. Make your limbs calm and your mind quiet and in you go.

Tonight I write him a letter telling him I think he was right. But that also I think there is meaning, and it lives in nurturing, in making life sweeter for ourselves, and for those around us.