I consider myself lucky.
My mother, when she was a child, would go to the beach with her family to enjoy a day in the sun, to splash around in the water and build sand castles as the sun dried the salt into her hair.
As she grew older, her family stopped going to the beach. My mother got to watch firsthand as her fellow humans strangled the life out of the water.
I consider myself lucky because I was born five years after the Ocean Crisis - a nation-wide panic that arose after a woman swam in the sea and contracted a deadly virus just from the water.
They've long since cured that horrific disease. They haven't cured the oceans.
My mother says that once upon a time, you could wade out into the water and see your feet. You could swim and submerge your face without instantly being met with papers and plastics and dead sea animals.
Those once upon a times are long since gone.
I followed in my mother's footsteps and became a marine biologist, a job that is quickly dying since there is little left to study in the ocean. Scuba diving is prohibited, as is surfing, waterskiing, fishing, and, for the most part, swimming. It makes our jobs a lot harder, but we are still allowed to take out submarines.
Not that there's much point. It's not like we can ever see more than five feet in front of us as it is.
Today is no different. A plastic bag gets stuck on my window and I have to steer around blind until finally, the currents of the ocean pull it off again.
As it slithers over the side of our submarine like some disgusting snake, I am met with perhaps the most unexpectedly heartbreaking sight I have seen in my decade of work here.
A tiny seahorse is floating in the ocean, somehow avoiding all the drifting trash, hugging a Q-tip tight to its body.
It knows no other life than this struggle within the dumpster that has taken over our oceans. It knows no blue waters, sunny skies, an ocean you can see for miles in. It knows only this - its life preserver of a Q-tip, its constant avoidance of human filth.
There is nothing I can do for it. Perhaps we can figure out ways to clean up the ocean or build sanctuaries for what animals we can save, but this singular, tiny, unassuming seahorse is doomed. I don't have the means to take it back to the lab with me and as soon as I resurface, the creature will be lost forever, hidden by the plastic bags and utensils and straws.
We sit there for a long while, the seahorse and I, as I try to imagine a world where oceans are a source of joy.
