Migrations

by Charlotte McConaghy

She doesn’t need it anymore—her fledglings are already diving for their own food—but she returns to it like all mothers unable to let go.

Because one thing was clear to me from the start: I didn’t belong.

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’s a compass in my heart that leads me not to true north but to true sea.

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.

Only a great fool, my mother once told me, does not fear the sea.

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

What crueler fate is there than to belong in the arms of a woman who dies each night?

there’s no way to conjure fear if it doesn’t exist.