The Price We Pay #PlanetOrPlastic

Alien

My tiny heart flutters. The strain of starvation and fear has pushed my waning body to the limit to get away.

The colossal leviathan only glides closer. Harboring no regard for the storm roiling inside my minuscule, spiny body. I'm one of the last remaining morsels of food in this waste and like me, he's only focused on getting a pure morsel of food. Hopelessness falls over me as I realize that I can't get away. This is the end.

Desperately, I search around myself thinking that if only I found a tether I could hang on, blend in and save my own life. Once upon a time, I could have found millions, even billions of hiding spots in the coral I lived in. It used to be vibrant, filled with the promise of life, and safe from danger. That was before the ocean came crashing down around us, making us aliens in our own home.

The coral reefs are dead, bleached a sterile, unfeeling white. The polyps inside heaved their last breaths long ago. The prey suddenly understanding the panicked desperation of a starving predator. We all want to live, but in this haze filled with that strange shiny material, there's no hope.

My tail catches on something and my heart leaps into my throat. Am I saved? 

A tether has found me but as I look back, panic rises in my heart. It's the wrong color. Long and thin, a soft pink, with fuzz attached at the ends. Against my own orange, it's like a beacon in the dark. Calling out, waiting for someone to notice the panicked seahorse caught on this infernal piece of trash.

These are the new inhabitants of our world: shiny, insistent, immortal. We mistook them as food at first, then my friends started to choke on them, the turtles suffocated, their shells a tomb. No one was safe from the trash soup we had begun to live in.

The shadowed ray comes closer. As the anxiety rises with his growing nearness, I see that he's been blinded now. There's a sheet over his face, his eyes covered in the shiny material as he swims right past me. I should be glad that my life was spared. Through the clouded yellow water, there's nothing to see anymore, no beauty to be found.

All we can do is remember what the ocean was, filled with iridescent fish in their tightly knit schools, the orange feet of seagulls piercing the surface, and the warm caresses of the pure ocean current.

I wish I could have called the ray back, asked him, begged him even to eat me. Maybe then I'd be free, free to join the departed in a place where we belonged again. A vibrant, living, breathing ocean, free of the trash and death this new one seems to be eternally filled with.

Until then, I'll float, haplessly lost, tail stuck to this abomination, an alien in an ocean I used to call home.