"If this whale’s song is higher than all the others, can anyone hear him? Is all his singing for naught, his voice drifting slowly into the great, dark oceanic abyss?" --Emily Persico
The song of the whale rang out, empty and sorrowful. It echoed like it was sung into a cavern of loss.
The whale swam alone, gliding through the water singing, crying out for anyone to hear her and understand her. To sing back to her.
Occasionally, once every five or so years, she would sing her lovely, lonely song, soulful and deep, and it would ring back. She swam, eagerly, to find the source of the call. Her giant heart cracked inside her, pieces of her hope fragmenting further each time she realized the sound was only an echo off stone, herself ringing hollow in the sea, an unrequited love.
No other creature ever answered her plaintive call.
Sometimes, when she dove deep into the water, she felt she was close to finding someone or something that understood her. Her eyes roved the deep, the inky blackness, searching for something she wasn’t sure she’d ever find.
Because she couldn’t be alone. How could she be alone? How cruel a world would it be to create a being with no equal, no one to share their existence with, even for a moment?
She couldn’t be alone.
Yet she was.
Year after year, decade after decade, she floated along. She encountered other whales, heard their songs, and ached to join them. But when she tried, it was as if they couldn’t hear her. No sound came from her lungs. Her melodies were silent, her laments unheard.
Even the foghorns, friends of the deep, could not match her crooning lullabies.
She thought the loneliness would kill her. She thought she would shatter, the core of her being cracking straight in two. Still, the whale survived. All alone in the vast darkness, she persisted.
But she would not suffer silently—she screamed, and begged to be heard.
It took decades. Decades of grief, pain, and fury at her existence. Finally, her poor soul collapsed beneath the weight of her sorrow, and one day, she burst. With a dying breath, her lungs exploded in a cry of immeasurable loss. Her song echoed across the seas, the cosmos, a ballad that told the tale of her life, and her depthless longing. It moved the stars. Shook planets in their orbit. Crumbled moons. Rang out in
every abyss in every corner of the oceans.
Somewhere deep, somewhere near the heart of the world, something heard her.
And they sang back to her, a mournful, lonely cry, desperate to be heard.