off-track: writing.

I got lost in the Thames River. It was just one of those things, a turn here, a turn there, but a turn too early threw it all off. We think we're big enough, we think we know which way the current flows, the feel of the water, the taste in and out of the Atlantic, but we don't. We get lost, like anything would, in our heads, the most dangerous place to be alone.

I started to panic when the smell got all wrong. The water didn't feel right - the organisms, the color, the smell. The passageway started to narrow. Embankments formed on either side of me and soon I realized I could not turn around. My stomach touched a sharp rock bottom, then scraped it, then it tore me. I stopped, the smell of my own blood unfailingly halting me. Bright lights shined down on me. Loud sounds were above me. People were all around me.

And I could not move. Fear, physicality, no matter how I tried, I could not move. I was lifted into open air paralyzed with fear. Something or someone decided I was no longer suited for the water. And only when I looked around me and heard the whir of this big dry city and saw the bleak colorless shapes did I realize the extent to which I had gone so horribly wrong.

For whatever reason, I ended up here with a body too big and skin too soft. I'm leaking through myself, back into the water. I feel all of me will continue to leak through my stomach until in some form, I am all back in the water again.

That will be good, but will they know that, will they know how good it will be that it happened this way when they write the headline 'tragic ending for lost whale in London.'