We spread. Like our Earth’s tectonic plates. We evolved, spread, flourished, and changed.  We spun, leaped and dove.  We became like the stars of the Earth, spread in the ocean as stars in the sky.  As the water kept moving and flowing our Earth kept changing.  We kept changing.  Some of us stayed in the seemingly endless sea of stars, and some of us left, spreading across the Earth, constantly spreading, constantly moving.  The world was not so empty.  The sea was not so endless.  We were not so alone.

We continued to swim through time.  Then we saw the silver stone that shone too bright in the water.  It pierced us with uncontrollable pain, and made blood, the color of a melting sunset.

We changed. And spread apart.  The silver stone kept piercing, followed by the color of the melted sunset.  But then they increased.  The silver became like the claws of a crab, constantly poking, cutting, killing.  We shrieked, surrounded in noise, but no one heard us. They wouldn’t understand.  They took us away from our sky of stars.  While they spread, we shrank.  We kept seeing the horrible unnaturally bright and deep color of the melting sunset.  The endless cries. The life that once seemed so timeless and free, was now filled with terror.  Tight painful webs of torture, caught us, choking us, and leaving us gasping for air.  We’re screaming, a scream of the wind through us as we used to soar through the oceans as birds through the sky.

  And I woke up, with the memory of my family, the dolphins, and the ocean, tormenting me every night.  I wish the blood would stop.  Staining the ocean like an exploding sunset, I still see it everywhere.  “I wish we could go back’ I thought.  I wish I could know what it’s like to swim in an endless sky of stars.  I wake up to horror, every day, in a place that humans call SeaWorld.   They were surrounding me, closing in a huge stadium, a wall of sound, and I’m reminded of the way they killed so many of my friends and family. Which is worse? Dying, while you hear your family shrieking around you. Or being a slave, where no one can hear you, or even if they can, they don’t try to understand.  There are too many colors, too, bright, and unnatural.  This water is so unnaturally blue, and it has a sickening taste.   I’m poisoned.  And yet they’re screaming.  Can’t they leave us alone? I’m dying but no one listens or sees. I have a never ending smile of sadness.  I go through the motions like I do every day.  I let they play with me. My world fell into the whirlpool of the exploded sunset.

I sometimes wonder as I waste away in here, are they oblivious or cruel?  Could they change?  “Hurry” I thought, “Before there are no more stars in the ocean.”