Dear Dolphin

Dear dolphin,

You still feel like home. You must feel children’s hands clasping your dorsal fin every day of your life - if you are still alive. I don’t know how long dolphins live, but I’d like to say as long as humans do. You deserve that much. You deserve a long life with baby-blue show pools and those plump, shiny-scaled fish snapped into your mouth like a medal in the evenings after the crowds have gone. I miss you. I can still remember the way I held your fin in my small hand like a lifeline. You were slicker than I imagined, but slippery and salty, as expected of someone like you. You come from those high tides and foaming waves, you come from those deep trenches with the pressure too intense for people like me, people like us to live there. Now you live in the glass, easy on the human eyes to keep you in our sights through the fogging of so many childrens’ faces pressed up against it, struggling to see your excellence. You remind me of balmy summers and life vests and tide pools, of the crunch of sand shaken out of a sneaker on the bus ride back to Tampa, Florida. Of the way we all came out into the soft morning air and sank down to our waists in your home, like we did in the touch pools up to our ankles with all the stingrays sweeping great dust clouds under the surface and the rough bumps of a starfish felt on the pads of our tiny fingers. Of the way we huddled there, in awe of you and your glimmering silver body, the twists and turns of a form I could never quite put to words. Can you hear when the children laugh for you? To them you are the tropical postcard mascot, jumping, poised out of the water surrounded by swaying palm trees and women in bikinis resting upon the sand, backs arched. They are imitating you, dolphin. You cut through the water, dangerous, but I held on because I knew you were experienced. You were warmer than the sandpaper sharks and the penguins, where the chill was permanent. I hope I was warm too.