Every year the salmon spawn and cruise upstream to some unspoken holy land that I will never know about for a number of reasons, maybe I’m unworthy and clueless and watch too much TV or maybe it’s because I am simply not a salmon.
But these fish live, breathe and die in these rivers and their bodies slowly rise to the top of the water, they break the surface and float down stream while their skin cooks under this hot summer sun and every year when this happens I get that empty feeling again where I’m not sure if I want to kill myself or not.
When they wash up on shore or get trapped between rocks, their bellies sometimes burst open, the light pink color of their flesh showing, flies crawling over their eyes(god animals can be so disgusting).
But you also see their scales, their beautiful red and green scales that remind you of Christmas when you were a kid and all you wanted was a bike, and now that bike sits and grows rust in your garage.
And how the day before winter break your teacher would put on a movie and pass around hot chocolate and now you drink black coffee over the stove (well not entirely black, you have to have your splash of oat milk).
You would come rushing home and try to guess your presents by their sound and shape and feel and you wonder if salmons ever gave each other gifts, maybe not stones or grass, maybe just a touch of a fin or a glance out of that forever open eyeball, maybe a passing feeling of love.
And maybe that red and green salmon with the big hump on his back, washed up on shore was a giver.
And when I look at these salmon I think about my dad and his friends who drank too much and how when I was little they would come home with big crates of fish and I would look into their eyes, their mouths slowly opening and closing, their gills still rising and I didn’t know how to feel.
How did they feel?
Did they know this would happen?
Do fish wake up every morning and expect the cold hand of death just above the surface of the ocean?
Just like how I would wake up every morning thinking ‘this is it, this could be the day’ God this is what I’ve come to, relating to a fish.
If washed up fish could talk they would say ‘don’t save me, let me die against this cool gravel, let me stare up at the sky, I would never have known how beautiful a sunset is’ Or maybe they don’t think anything.
Maybe animals don’t think anything at all.