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I will not beg you to leave me alone, I was the one who sought you out. As I write these lines, we are caught in one last quarrel and, as always, you will have the final word. I surrender, certainly, and I am not trying to be right. My ego remains in its place, quietly tucked away in the last dry corner of my mind.
Dear ocean, it has now been four months since we have been sharing our lives, and already I must leave you. I have not yet departed and I am already making you promises. I give you my word that we will meet again. I cherished every moment spent in your company, even the most difficult ones, because they revealed me to myself. You allowed me to discover myself, to push beyond my limits, to surprise myself and, most importantly, to acknowledge my humility. For every treasure found here, I want to say thank you.
You surely recognize my voice, for beside you I have cried out more than once. I even believed I had already shouted my final breath from deep within my lungs. I cried out to you to stop, to leave me alone, to calm yourself… And yet, every day, there echoed a morning outburst of my small morning voice, my famous and traditional “Hello World” from the deck of my tiny skiff.
Our daily life was built of wondrous horizons, unobstructed skies, and stars. From one full moonrise to the next, and through your celebrated sunsets, I encountered your soul and your inhabitants, surprising and marvelous beings. Each day, I caught sight of one of them, whether it was a whale, adorable pilot whales, dolphins, schools of fish, from the smallest to the most fearsome in the world, an old turtle, birds, squids, or graceful jellyfish. Each time, I addressed them with curiosity and with reverence.
Here, thousands of beings who contribute to the world respect one another and meet their end according to your will, whether by their flesh or by their cunning, managing with difficulty to maintain an uncertain balance in order to build this marine universe to which I offer my reverence today.
I have been afraid of you more than once. Now that I love you this deeply, I am far more afraid for you than for my own small, limited self. I fear for your soul, but above all for the people of Earth, who all depend on you.
Promise me that you will take good care of the sailors of the planet who will ride upon you and pass through your waters. For my part, I promise to always remain loyal to you, to speak well of you to them and to praise your beauty, your discipline, your colors and, above all, your inhabitants. I will tell them that you are strong, yet very fragile, proud yet modest and graceful, and even if you are sometimes terrifying, I will always honor you. I will tell them that I have forgiven you every quarrel, every state. I will ask my human friends to take care of you, for all of us who call Earth home.
For the two of us know well that no matter the outcome of our story, despite my love for you, I will leave this world long before you do, through old age, illness, or wanderings, like all my human brothers and sisters. By ourselves alone, we have done you much harm; you could have held it against me to the point of taking my life, yet you did not. You let me pass despite your most fearsome states of mind. For that, I owe you everything.
I will speak of you to them, I will tell them how beautiful you are, how little we truly care about your fate. I will tell them that your birds courted me every day, that your wind can be as gentle as a spring morning, and that your silence can awaken the oldest memories buried deep within our minds. I will try to share our story with them, to draw them toward you and make them love you, love you always.
Perhaps humans will come to understand that the harm we do to you, we first do to ourselves. For after our departure and that of the birds, you will continue to erode the hardest rocks of this world, to embrace the shores, to take everything in your path and to tear away many trees. You will surge endlessly within yourself, you will rumble, and always, even if humanity is no longer there to listen with its deafened ears, you will make the air crackle at your surface and thus create the most beautiful sound in the world: the effervescence of your waters.
The Lady with the Oars
