Work Text:
When I was born everything seemed normal. Then one day - at the time I was four, maybe five - my parents decided to go on a vacation, just the three of us. We went to Italy, I don't know where exactly we went, just that it was in Italy somewhere by the sea. That was when my parents first realized that something about me was different. That I was different.
It happened on a trip to the sea. We were walking along the beach, our bare feet strolling leisurely across the velvet sand. We came to the water and I remember being so shocked because in all the stories the sea was described as a deep blue. This was where all these metaphors and romantic declarations for blue eyes came from. I was just standing there until my parents asked me what was wrong.
I kept looking at the water and asked them - with a confused voice of a small child - "Why isn't it blue?".
There was a moment of silence, they looked stunned at me for a moment, then "What do you mean honey? The water is as blue as ever." my mother implored.
But it's not blue at all, mommy. Can't you see? It's clear. Like those glass bottles we have at home. You know?" I replied.
"Can you tell me what you can see? Can you describe it to us, buddy?" my dad, who had been silent for some time now, inquired.
So I told them about the fish I could see, all the weird sea plants swishing in the water, and the other sea animals that I could make out from the beach. When I was finished describing it, my dad gently took a hold of my shoulders and told me that they saw it differently than I did. He told me this made me different - unique - but that I shouldn't tell others, because they either wouldn't believe me or think that I was crazy.
I never really grasped why I shouldn't tell people when I was younger and a lot of the other kids made fun of me for saying that the sea was clear.
Later, when I was older, I joined a ship's crew. By that time I was smart enough not to talk about everything I could see below the waves - everything that was directly underneath the ship - and that the sea I saw was clear. And when I'm on the ship, together with my crew, I can look in the ocean - watch all the amazing sea life. Some of them never being seen by humans, only by their fellow sea life.
And when the crew makes fun of me for being so obsessed with looking in the ocean, I smile and think to myself that I am lucky, I'm the one who can see all of these amazing things. Not them.
Because I was born with special eyes, eyes that don't see the sea as an endless, deep, mysterious, blue, salty expanse of water but as a transparent liquid, spreading across a deep abyss, filled with colorful sea life.