What does my body know?

By the last day, I’d been sleeping 10 hours a night and couldn’t get enough rest. My body was heavy. I couldn’t catch what I needed. My feet drug and my shoulders just called to the ground, like they wanted me to be held there, against something steady.

Jellyfish don’t need the oxygen other creatures do. They come through the algae and the muck and the wreckage done by others better than so many sea beasts, but do they thrive? They can tolerate more, go farther on less, but what for?

Survival doesn’t mean what it once did. Not for me.

We’d found $1.14 this trip. It trickled in: a penny, then another, a pair of pennies, then the dime, and that dollar bill the last day. It was folded then smushed, the way a thing gets wrapped up on itself, like in a pocket, maybe with a receipt and parking stub or a scrap of paper with an address on it. What was this dollar pressed against? Who were its neighbors before it got lost along the way in a move? When did all these little creases show up?

“Hello, jellies!” I called without thinking when we entered the dim exhibit.

“Hello, jellies!” a child joined in from behind me, and I turned to see her smile filling her face. I didn’t hear myself say it, but I heard my echo so knew I must have done it out loud, that greeting I felt forming in my lungs the moment I spotted the tanks.

What do the jellies know? Do they get what they need, in these tubes and such?

My child wanted to know whether they had eyes, whether one of the jellies was looking at her, but I’d just seen some information, so I only knew about photosensitive cells.

“They have cells to sense where there’s light,” I told her.

“Am I light?” she asked. Yes, sweet child! Yes!

“Humans can’t make their own light,” I said, trying to keep my duty to the facts, thinking of bioluminescence and other animal tricks our species doesn’t enjoy, “but it’s important, huh? We need the light.”

We saw the jellies as soon as we could in our visit, part of our plan to get our money’s worth, get these things seen before the exits were locked for the night.

To see and be seen, the object of the trip, the dance of all creature-kind.

I fought to fill my lungs and we found our way onward through the dark.

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