Born a Whale
I was born a whale.
I remember this clearly: floating in a cloud of amniotic fluid, light filtering through from the surface. I was not an easy birth. My mother labored for hours as I fought to remain like a ballast in her belly. But I was born, and even with eyes closed I sensed the light above, and the overwhelming instinct to go towards it.
I think the trouble began with that first breath. Air rushed in through my blowhole, oxygenating the blood from my snout to my flukes. Some signal must have been fired, some latent genes sprung into action. I blame the air. Air, which I needed, which would remake me.
The process was slow. Slow enough that for a while I existed with the pod, swimming under my mother’s shadow and feeding on her milk. I grew, but less robustly than I should have in the warm summer water. When autumn came I had only a thin layer of blubber and I began to feel the cold. I lingered near the surface, unable to stand diving deeper. My lungs couldn’t bear it either, or they never grew to. I needed air, too much air. A breath every few minutes, or less.
Eventually I refused to dive at all. I stalled, floating like a raft or a surfaced submarine, my blowhole poking from the water as the periscope. The skin around it began to lose its oily luster and turn white from the sun.
My mother sensed there was something wrong with me. She tried to urge me back under but I wouldn’t go. The thrust of her body, so much larger than mine, would tumble me around in the slipstream and I would lose all sense of orientation. My flippers felt thinner, my tail like it was opening on a seam.
By the end of autumn the pod left for deeper waters. Don’t think I was abandoned – they tried, in their way, to revive me, to drive krill into my weak mouth, to push me bullishly along. But there was nothing they could do to stop the change.
My mother was the last to leave. She swam circles around me for days, hoping against hope. Eventually her need for survival, and my indifference to it, won out. I still remember her song, mournful, as she disappeared into the dark blue.
After that, my memories grow hazy. I felt myself swimming towards something with need, though I couldn’t name it as food or kin, or any of the urges of a whale. But I had to follow it. It was as bright and sharp as the glow of the surface at my birth, calling me to it before I knew what air or breath were.
And then one day the water wasn’t endless beneath me, but had a floor. That was when I left the ocean for the first time.
I was found on a beach, standing naked in the sand as a children’s swim lesson began. I guess I had changed enough by then that I resembled a human, because one of the mothers wrapped a striped beach towel around me. I remember this sensation distinctly: the rough press of fibers, the sublime warmth that enveloped me for the first time.
I was taken to a police station, where a social worker gave me my first clothes (I had to be taught how to put them on) and started asking me questions. The sounds of people were different from the sounds of whales, but I discovered I understood them. I wonder now if I would still understand the sounds of whales. I’ve tried listening to recordings, but of course it isn’t the same as hearing the frequencies resonate through water.
Anyway, the questions were all things like “how did you get to the beach?” “who brought you there?” “where are your parents?” “what is the last thing you remember?” I tried telling her about my pod – I did not have “parents”, but I had a mother – and why they had left me. But I began to suspect that these answers were troubling her, so eventually I just said I didn’t remember. That was the only time I ever tried telling anyone about my past.
There’s not much about my body that betrays my old life either. My skin is drier than most, so I use a lot of moisturizers to stay comfortable. It’s turned light enough to match that of other humans, and my back has an oval-shaped patch that’s even lighter, I think from my time floating at the surface. In the center of it is my blowhole, my only relic from my time as a whale. I can still breathe from it if I try, even though I now have a nose and mouth. No one knows it’s there. The social worker didn’t look closely enough, and I haven’t let anyone see me with my clothes off since.
But I do still like to go to the beach in the summer, when the water is warm. When no one is around I float on my stomach, face down, breathing through my blowhole. And I listen: for my pod, for other whales, for a familiar song.
Jackie Roberti
Jackie Roberti (she/her) is a writer and visual artist based in Somerville, MA. Her work has been published in Reckoning Magazine and The Quarter(ly). Find her on substack at jackierowrites.substack.com, and her art on Patreon at @pleinjus.
More: http://www.jackieroberti.com
Comments
A lovely tale of loss and belonging, or unbelonging if you will. It seems that many of us have been born of something else, something we must frequently keep secret to keep the peace, to fit it. Thanks Jackie.