Recollections of an Old Sea Turtle

Alex Tseng

Period 6

WLH

Recollections of an Old Sea Turtle

I woke up for the first time in my life. It was not the most pleasant morning, unless a pleasant morning was described as waking up in a cramped, dark barrier filled with oozing liquids. Getting out of that closed space was my top priority. As if my beak had a mind of its own, it pecked furiously at the barrier wall. After what felt like eternity, my beak suddenly pierced a hole large enough for me to fit through. With the remainder of my strength, I pushed my body out of the hole. As I got out, I flipped over onto my smooth, soft shell. The surroundings were still darker than the deepest depths of the ocean, but I could feel the sound of crashing waves echoing in my head as my tiny nostrils filled with the salty scent of ocean breeze. I could hear the voice of nature beckoning me as I poked my gooey, green head into the moist sand. It wanted me to travel upwards, but there was no telling what would be in store for me. But I desperately needed to know what waited for me up there. With all the force my frail body could handle, I flipped over and plunged into the moist sand and desperately dug upwards.

Beaming rays of sunshine touched upon my crusty skin as my flippers emerged from the ground. My head, caked in sand, popped out from the ground. The splashes of water were clearer now, and the scent of sea salt invigorated my nostrils. Only this time, the scent was different. As I struggled to open my dry eyes, I felt a soft breeze. Not a calming sea breeze, but an ominous breeze. The wind carried the sounds of screaming, crying, yelling. Finally, as my eyes cleared as the sand cracked off my eyelids, my cruel surroundings were revealed to me. I could see my brothers and sisters racing to the glistening ocean as if they were running from a plague. Around them were the winged ones and the clawed ones. The clawed ones picked up my siblings and crushed their weak shells, devouring them. Millions of them scuttled around as if they formed an army, grasping my brothers and sisters in their hands. The angel-looking ones were not any more forgiving. As one my brothers was a grain of sand’s length away from the ocean, a winged one grasped him and threw him across the landscape. I watched in horror as I saw my brothers and sisters, one by one, met their ends. Nature’s call still rang in my ears, trying to draw me closer to the ocean. The ocean was waiting for me, almost as if it were offering me a helping hand. However, I did not have the courage to accept it. It was a battlefield, a warzone, pure hell. I could not cross it alive, no matter what I did. That was the first time I ever felt powerless, petrified, unworthy of life itself. It was almost if my small, pathetic body had become a statue itself. But what raced through my undeveloped mind was more complicated than that. Something  I hadn’t seen what lied beyond this battlefield in front of me. If I stayed there, in that pathetic little hole, what could I  have ever accomplished? Would I have spent the rest of my life regretting what I could have done in a future I would never been able to witness? My front right flipper moved forward almost on impulse, then my front left. Soon, a line of hundreds of pebble-sized imprints could be seen from a dark burrowing hole.

It was a relieving feeling: the feeling that you can push yourself forward through pure willpower. All the sounds of nature slowly faded into a calming silence. No longer could I hear the piercing screeches of the winged ones, nor could I hear the agonizing cries of my brothers and sisters. The sand beneath my puny feet suddenly felt painless to trudge through, almost as if it was completely solid. I crawled faster and faster, hoping to get closer to the safe haven with every step. Suddenly, a gust of the sandy breeze was caught in my eyes, forcing my eyelids to shut for a fraction of a second. When I reopened them, the ocean, my future, had vanished. Once again, there was darkness. Only this time, the darkness did not seem as welcoming as the darkness in the burrow, but was instead a strange, unknown darkness. Chills enveloped my entire body, and the beautiful rays of warmth from the sunshine did not touch upon my skin. Was this feeling, this atmosphere, the feeling of death? Had I been caught by one of the cursed, winged ones? Or had the clawed ones dragged me into one of their dens? I was terrified by my own thoughts. Fear itself seemed to radiate off my skin, for the deeper I sunk into fear, the colder the air around me seemed to get. Fear had stunned me again. It was the second time in my life where I felt helpless, immobile, and downright petrified. However, hope still existed, even as I was about to accept my unfortunate death. It was then when I noticed that there was no ground beneath me, above me, or to my sides. Movement was harder in that dark space; I felt that even if I waited for over a century, my miniscule flipper would only move a stone’s length. The soft shell above my back felt weightless as the sounds of the crashing waves became completely inaudible. Instead, I could hear soft movements deep beneath my body. Before my eyes could turn down to see the colorful landscape of the new world I was in, I most definitely knew that this was, indeed, the future I dreamed of.