All The Thoughts Of A Turtle Are Turtle

A sea turtle hatchling imprints on the magnetic field of the beach where it is born. This happens once, in the first minutes of its life, during the frantic crawl from the nest to the ocean. The hatchling records the exact magnetic signature of that stretch of coast and carries it for the rest of its life. Decades later, after crossing entire oceans, the turtle will use that memory to find the same beach and lay its eggs. The logic is simple and terrible. If this place was safe enough for me, it will be safe enough for my offspring. The only evidence the turtle has is its own survival. But here is the truth. The Earth’s magnetic field fluctuates. The beach the turtle returns to is never the exact beach it left. The coordinates have drifted. The sand has changed. The shoreline has moved. The turtle is navigating back to a place that no longer exists, using a map it wrote in the first minutes of its life, and it does not know the map is wrong. It returns anyway. It always returns. I have been doing this my whole life.

I was twelve years old the first time I saw a sea turtle nest. My father took me to see one on a beach in Florida late at night. He was the kind of man who knew something about everything and never ran out of things to tell you. The sand was white and cool under my feet and the air was warm and humid and everything smelled like salt water and summer. He shined a light into the nest and there they were. The eggs. Dozens of them, pale and round, buried in the sand like something the earth was keeping safe. He told me that only one in a thousand would survive. That the hatchlings would crawl to the water in the dark and most of them would be eaten before they ever touched the ocean. That the ones who made it would spend a decade in the open sea in what scientists call the lost years because no one knows where they go. And then he looked at me and said all the thoughts of a turtle are turtle. Ralph Waldo Emerson. My father talked like that. He handed you the whole world in a sentence and expected you to keep up. I did not understand it that night. That sentence has followed me everywhere. I think what Emerson meant is that a turtle does not question its own design. It does not wonder why it is crawling toward the water. It does not ask if the ocean is safe. Every impulse it has moves in one direction and that direction was set the moment it was born. About what it means to be a creature whose entire navigation system was written in the first minutes of its life. About what happens when the instructions you were given no longer match the world you are standing in. About what it costs to keep following it anyway.

When I was a child my grandmother bought me a set of glass turtles. Red, yellow, green, blue. I kept them on my windowsill and arranged them by color the way I arranged everything by color because even then my brain needed things to make sense. When the sun came through the window the light hit the glass and threw rainbow patterns and I would sit there and watch them move across the walls. I did not know then that I was practicing the thing that would both save me and trap me. The need for order and routine and sameness and knowing exactly what comes next. The need to arrange the world into something I could predict. If the turtles were in the right place the light came through the way it was supposed to and the colors landed where they were supposed to and everything was fine. I still think about those turtles. I think about what I was actually doing on that windowsill. I was teaching myself that if I could control the arrangement I could control the outcome. That if everything stayed where I put it the world would keep making sense. Grief took that from me. Grief walked into my life and moved every single thing I had ever arranged and I have been rearranging ever since. I rearrange people. I rearrange plans. I rearrange how much I let myself want. I hold everything in place with both hands because I know what happens when I let go. The turtles are gone now. The windowsill is gone. The light is different. And I am still arranging.

I have lived through real devastation. Enough to alter a nervous system permanently. And somewhere in the middle of it my body wrote a rule that if I wanted less, risked less, attached less, I would survive. It worked. It worked so well I never stopped. But the directive has not changed and the world has. I am still holding the same playbook my worst years handed me and I am using it to navigate years that are asking me to live. I withhold desire. I withhold hope. I withhold trust. I keep one foot out of every room I walk into because some part of me is still calculating the fastest way to leave it. I hover. I intellectualize. I make myself small in places where I am allowed to be big because somewhere inside me there is still a voice that says wanting fully invites catastrophe. That if I let myself have the thing it will be taken. That the safest version of my life is the most invisible one. I am alive but my body does not know the war is over. I am the turtle swimming back to a beach that no longer exists, following the only directions it knows, and I am so good at the navigation that I have never once stopped to ask whether the destination is still worth reaching.

The machines are breathing for him. The sucking in and the pause and then the exhale. The room smells like antiseptic and something else, something underneath it that I will spend years trying to forget and never will. My sister is crying. My aunt is telling stories, trying to make everyone laugh. My mom is holding his other hand and her jaw is set and she is not crying and that is worse. People keep showing up, distant family I am not sure I recognize. I am standing there and my body already knows the position of grief because it has been here before. I want to run. I want to outrun everything in this room. I want to go back or go forward or just freeze right here because I know how this ends and it never ends well. And then I am twelve. The wind is blowing my dad’s hair and we are on the beach and the sand is cool and the air is warm and he is smiling and pointing at the eggs and the waves are lapping and I am safe and he is alive and everything is still the way it is supposed to be. A loggerhead will swim ten thousand miles across an ocean to find the exact beach where it was born using nothing but what the beach gave it in the first minutes it was alive. A green sea turtle can slow its heart to one beat every nine minutes. Nine minutes of silence between each beat. They do this when they dive. They go deep and they go quiet and the heart barely beats and the body holds on to every last bit of oxygen it has. They survive by slowing down. By going still. By letting the body decide what the mind cannot. That is what I am doing. Standing in a hospital room and swimming back to a beach in Florida because my body knows that is where everything was still okay. Take me back. Do not let this happen. And I open my eyes and the machines are still breathing and my father’s face is still his face and his hands are still his hands and I am holding one of them and it is warm. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet. Nine minutes between heartbeats. I can do that. I can go quiet. I can slow everything down. I can make this room stop. I can make the clock stop. I can hold my breath long enough for this to not be happening. I can swim back. I can find the beach. I can put the turtles back on the windowsill. Red yellow green blue. I can make the light come through. I can fix this. I can fix this. I can fix this. I cannot fix this.

My father shined a light into a nest on a beach in Florida and showed me something I have spent my whole life trying to understand. One in a thousand makes it. The rest are taken by the crabs and the birds and the waves and the dark. The ones who make it do not know why they were spared. They just keep going. All the thoughts of a turtle are turtle. I finally understand.