Fan Coral

I met you at a shore far away from here, on a windy, sunny day, in an amalgam of sand and salt, old flip-flops, plastic bags, and fishing nets. It was India, it was 2015, I was 19 and you were dead. I sat on what I tried to call a beach, but, upon closer inspection, it was a wasteland. 

Yes, there was sand. Yes, there was wind, and salt, and sun. But there were also razor blades hidden in the seaweed, and single-use plastic bottles, discarded in a hurry, half sticking out from their shallow graves. I sat, and walked, and didn’t dare take off my shoes for fear of cutting my soles on the cruel smirk of disposable cutlery.            
And there I found you, the most beautiful Being for miles. Your stiffened veins: an intricate net of red and white. Your paper-like wing: more fragile than any bird’s. I found you, I pulled you out of the plastic-sand, and I held you gently. In this waste-zone of anthropogenic matter, this pock-faced proof of human obliviousness, you were witness to a non-human past, a small finger on the many-boned hand of a withering ecosystem.      
And perhaps I should have left you there, to fall apart, to become sand, become both fragment and fragmented. But your fragility touched me. And so, I took you away from your home, the wind, and the flip-flopped beach to my room, and later, my home.