Migrations

by Charlotte McConaghy

We had no money, but we went often to the library. According to Mam, inside the pages of a novel lived the only beauty offered up by the world. Mam would set the table with plate, cup, and book. We’d read through meals, while she bathed me, while we lay shivering in our beds, listening to the scream of wind through the cracked windows. We’d read while we balanced on the low rock walls that Seamus Heaney made famous in his poetry. A way to leave without really leaving.

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.”

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.

“I am a peaceful man. An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.”

“There is pleasure in the pathless woods. There is rapture on the lonely shore. There is society where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar.”

“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.

Thousands of species are dying right now, and being ignored. We are wiping them out. Creatures that have learned to survive anything, everything, except us.”

So it went for four years, every day without fail. Until I left not only my mother but my twelve kindred spirits, too. Sometimes I dream of them waiting in that tree for a girl who would never come, bringing gift after precious gift to lie unloved in the grass.

I am thinking that we have lost our minds and that this is ludicrous, foolish, absurd, but I am also thinking that this must finally be it: the end of loneliness.

And maybe that’s why I am filled with calm. 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’s a relief to at last have a purpose.

He said Franny Stone makes choices and the universe bends. She makes her own designs and always has; she is a force of nature and he the quiet thing that looks on and loves her for it, even then, still now.

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

“Don’t die in here. Not in a cage. Get free and die, if you have to.”

“Don’t apologize too much, kid. It’ll bleed you dry.”

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

If there are no terns left, I would like to be buried, so that my body can give its energy back to the earth from which it derived so much, so that it might feed something, give something, instead of only taking. If there are terns left …

If there are terns left, and it’s possible, and not too difficult, I would like my ashes to be scattered where they fly.

For the journey they have made. For the loveliness left behind. For you, and for promises, and for a life that was given to fate but could not comprehend your death’s inclusion in that.