Motionless, is a current example of me. I lay emotionless in the same spot as yesterday, in hope of finding prey, or even sight. Whilst my eyelids peel open and part to see, my pulse quickens. What meets my eye is darkness. Complete cold, evil, darkness. I have nothing to look at around me. My hope vanishes and the held down feeling comes back. The waters sways over my back, heavily. It's been like this for days and every day it must be getting worse. It started with hard surfaces piling over my home. That caused the start to the darkness. Only today, it seemed even more different. My home isn't recognisable to myself. My fins spring into action once again and I start rising. My pectoral fins are cramped and it hurts. Just like it hurts to remember my abandonment and, so far, my survival. I riser higher and higher and higher. I remember when I was just a baby stingray, I would feel like I was flying, soaring even, but without my litter mates, it's an empty, a forced movement. I miss them. My parents and my litter mates, but I don't know where they are. They disappeared the moment our home started... changing. I'm in my sandy safe place. My lonely safe place, without of my family and without an other species to keep me company or protect me from my own bitter reality. As I rise, my sight doesn't change. My sight is set on what I believe to be is the surface, the directions I remember my parents teaching me. I wish I could just know that they were okay or even alive. The tip of my flat body touches something solid at the surface of the water. A plastic carton of some sort. A stifling, toxic scent fills my nostrils. A scent thick enough to take someone's breath. And as slowly as I was rising, I sink. Hopelessness settles in the pit of my stomach. Why should I fight? They never learn, humans never learn. They don't think about anything but themselves. What about a life without oceans? Then I'm back at the bottom, right where I started. I want to soar again, I want to be with my loving family and be happy, not lonely. I want my past back, my so beloved past. I catch one last glimpse. One last glimpse of what causes evil to species like me. Maybe even more than species. A glimpse of a ray of light, a ray of hope, in a darkened, toxic sea flashes before me as my body finally hits back to the bottom, again motionless. I burrow in sadness like a pebble falling to the ocean floor. Is this how I go down? Sad from what others do to us? Hear us cry. The oceans been crying for decades, yet your ears only hear what they want too. We're dying. All of us. We just can't do it anymore. We can't go on with you killing us anymore.
