A Lobster's Visit

An Atlantic true lobster kept moist can stay alive up to thirty-six hours on dry land. Today, the day I have chosen to visit and explore a human town on the coast I have been eyeing for the past week, the sun is like an unforgiving heat ray, the air is like the preheating of an oven, and the wind is cool and fresh, carrying that addictively chemical smell of salt and seaweed, and all of these is why I do not think I will last as long as thirty-six hours. Nevertheless, as I crawled out of the water into a small beach next to the docks, the sand bumpy as it transitioned into mud further down, the waves splashing gently against my back, I felt a vigorous sense of adventure fill my veins, ready to last at least one human day. Living in the depths of the deep black waters of the Atlantic Ocean, you do not know when it is day or night unless you are near the surface. Down there, it is dark, cold, and depressing, vicious creatures lurking in the cloak of the darkness ready to pounce on you like the haunting of ravenous ghosts. I would like for one day to take a break and experience the life of the humans, a life ever so peaceful without the constant hunt for food or hiding from predators, in order to put things into perspective. Today, I am a human.

The port town I was visiting was a quaint little one, quiet and serene. In the water behind me, there were sailboats slowly moving with the soft push of the breeze. Their hulls and sails white as the teeth and underbelly of a great white shark, their masts reaching the skies, cutting through them like a knife. On their decks made of beige, wood grain planks, I curiously observed people operating the sheets, ropes, and the wheel. They were dressed in white t-shirts striped black or blue, pink and white blouses, jeans with brown belts, comfortable-looking skirts, swimsuits, sunglasses, white collared shirts, or no shirt at all. I noticed one man who was overlooking the sea, facing toward me, his hands on the silver rails of his boat, whose expensive-looking watch glinted as it reflected the sunlight like a flashlight aimed at one’s eyes. I noticed another who was chatting with what I assumed to be either friends or business adversaries on sun loungers, taking periodic swigs from a green glass beer bottle. Then there were the hulking yachts, miniature cruise ships that drifted along the calm waves parallel to the docks, a poignant reminder that I, a humble, tiny lobster, was at the mercy of these humans who commandeered and manned these behemoths of the sea. These sleek, massive blades slicing through the tension of the water seemed almost majestic to me, as if they were making way for royalty. They held numerous floors of luxury above their decks, structures at the very top supporting their radomes. Then my gaze wandered to the smaller speedboats, bursting in whitewater stretches up and down around all the other boats. There were many of them, like gnats buzzing around the bigger creatures. At last, I noticed the massive commercial tankers and fishing boats in the far distance. The tankers were the leviathans of the sea, bigger than anything else. Their hulls were red or black and they either carried colourful freight containers or big cylinders that funnelled plumes of smoke. They carried themselves with a weight unknown to anything else, heaving their presence across the open ocean indifferent to anyone in their way. The fishing boats were meagre in comparison, but held a sort of hungry aura to please customers, as if drawn to the aroma of netfuls of fish. Their bows were raised and the space above their decks were messy. Nets and ropes everywhere tangled like a spiderweb, seemingly pointless masts and poles jutting out of nowhere in random directions, orange buoys hanging on the side, chains and anchors hanging on the sides. Their crew consisted of a captain in a blue uniform and cap and everyone else in thick overalls. These ships dragged a flock of seagulls in the air around them wherever they went, as if carrying the irresistible stench of a possible feeding frenzy, for when they were actively lowering the nets, that heralded fish.

I took all this in with a breath of wonder. This benignant morning was a mood to remember, I would say. The ways of the humans were so very interesting! With each sight I wondered this, I wondered that, I had so many questions! But I must be conscious of my time, for the clock surely does not stop to take in the sights with you. I scuttled my eight tiny legs, heaving my heavy claws, the pride of a lobster, over flat muddy terrain which turned grassy as I went deeper into the town. That same energy of adventure carried on as I turned left to visit the boardwalks of the port, that of which housed countless parked vessels floating on the water, tied to the cleats on the dock. There were a few people walking on the planks. Some children running with their ice cream cones. Two older women strolling and chatting as they took in the view of the glimmering sea. An older gentleman, who was carrying a chum bucket and a fishing rod, was coming my way. I stopped him to ask a question.

“Hello, good sir,” I said. “I am a lobster visiting your nice little town. What is the name of it, may I ask?”

“My, what an interesting lad you are.” He raised his bucket hat, eyes widening at me. “This is Lunenburg, Nova Scotia.”

“West side of the Atlantic?”

“Correct. You are visiting Canada.”

“Interesting. Is that another name for this place?”

He smiled. “No! Lunenburg is the name of this town, Canada is the name of this country. A country is much, much bigger, lad. There are many towns in it.”

“Such odd conventions. Where I’m from, everywhere is called just one place: the Ocean. But, who am I to question them? Thank you sir, I’ll be on my way now.”

“Hope you like the town! It’s quite beautiful, you will see.”

The old man’s words stayed in my mind the first time I saw it in its full-view splendour. I walked down the paved streets while taking in with awe the breathtaking sight of the community. It was so colourful! Each house was painted a bright rainbow colour, none taller than four stories tall. Some were red, some were blue, some were green, others yellow. Then there were some that were a soft, baby blue, and others that were dental white, auburn, or grey. Their black or brown roofs sloped steeply or flatly, some going for a more curved design. They were situated on a rising hill inland like little schoolchildren lining up for a photograph, innocently and cutely next to each other in various heights, trying to be as still as possible. They had many windows on each wall, rows of them lined up orderly, creating a hole-filled look to the houses, frames and windowsills and balconies offering openings into their inside realms of which were foreign to mine. It all made me contemplate a bugging question about the humans and our sea creatures’ differences. To have towering abodes coloured in such unique, bright colours, why? Back where I came from, homes, if any existed, were black if the abyss of the deep sea critters, orange if the shell of a wandering hermit crab, or sandy if the burrow of an octopus. Only in shallow and tropical waters did I know of a civilization where the homes of the sea creatures were as vibrant as the houses of these humans, but even then, they were inadvertently done, the corals and reefs only having so much decision in the matter before bowing down to the natural selection of the wild. Meanwhile, these peculiar humans seemed to paint their houses deliberately, in a way to somehow mimic nature? I do not know. No, not nature. Perhaps, in order to fill a sense of boring artificiality that dreaded their souls in their creations, replacing sameness with wonderful qualities pleasing to their senses and minds? To replace what had been lost from nature? Breeding a sort of, I suppose, art in the way they do things? 

Such were the odd ways of these humans, but I did not let it fester my mind, else it would linger. I trotted along a road uphill deeper into the town. I saw an area with numerous vehicles parked side by side with painted lines in between them. Odd. I saw a plethora of large fabrics attached to various things such as poles, vehicles, and the front porches of houses, designed red and white with the leaf of a tree in the centre. Odd. Old-fashioned black-poled twin-light street lamps, small trees, flower pots and boxes, standing chalkboard signs with restaurant menus, porch railings, parking metres, wooden benches, and garbage cans cluttered the street as I went on. Stores and shops lined the sides of each road, their colours growing to be more daring. Now they were becoming light orange, raspberry, or mint green. Hanging signs perpendicular to their fronts revealed the names of each business. I wondered why they were placed that way, I assumed there was a practical reason such as making them easier for people to see while walking down the road. But it was still very odd and conventional, each place doing so as if it was necessary, as if they would be an outsider to society if they did not do it that way. I read some of the names. “Cilantro, The Cooks Shop,” or, “Trattoria Della Nonna, Ristorante e Pizzeria.” Again, I was hit with that peculiar feeling of awe at the strangeness of it all. Why certain phonetic sounds were attached to physical objects such as a herb, or to abstract titles one held in their heart but not hand, such as a cook. Proven that, from the second sign itself, that it did not have to be so, for other phonetic sounds could be attached to the same things with the use of another language. Even the sentence itself had two different ways of describing a place that served food to customers seated at tables, which, in this case, I will use the phonetic sound “restaurant” to describe what I mean. To remain conventional. But conventional to whom? To the English-speakers, such as I am? Or to the entire human race, but not any animals? When I continued on I found that certain shops seemed to have these striped awnings overhanging their fronts. I encountered a middle-aged woman in a modest flowery dress, sunglasses, and wide sunhat looking through the glass to view the inside of one of these shops. I asked her about my strange observance.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” I said. “Why are the awnings striped?” 

She had to see where I was pointing my claw to understand what I was talking about. “Hmm, I don’t know,” she said disinterestedly. 

“But you’re a human, are you not?”

“I am.”

“So why don’t you know?”

“I didn’t invent them. I didn’t even know they were called awnings.”

“Neither did I.”

“You should use the internet on your phone to find the answers to your questions.”

“Internet? Phone? Ma’am, please stop spouting nonsense. Back where I come from, we don’t need to do any of that. We haven’t really invented anything, you see, or named anything. If one lobster gives a name to something, then we all have to know that name. And boy, I’m sure we’d need the internet to look up the name of those somethings too, if we had that problem.”

“Maybe you should invent something, it could be nice for your lobster friends.”

“And you, ma’am, should learn why awnings are striped. Have a good day.”

How lost were these humans to not know the reasoning behind some of their conventions? It irked me, although mildly. After I bid her farewell, I carried on with my journey and met another stranger near the end of a road. It was a father walking down the front steps of his house, saying goodbye to his wife and children. “I love you,” he said, waving goodbye. I heard squeaky responses from the young ones and a mirrored response from the woman. As he made his way down into the driveway to get into his car, I asked him what that was all about.

“You say I love you to your wife and children every day?”

“I don’t miss a single one,” he replied.

“Interesting.”

“What about you?”

“Oh, supposedly you humans think we lobsters mate for life. I can’t really say if that’s true or not. You might be disappointed in the truth. But what I mean to point out is that we don’t say I love you to each other. Love is not something we can comprehend.”

“It’s a real good thing, let me tell you.”

“I don’t doubt that. What I doubt is if it’s actually needed. I mean, we lobsters live just fine without it, don’t we?”

“That is true.” The man’s gaze raised as if it provoked some thinking in him. “I’ve never thought about it that way before. Why are we humans this way?”

“It’s quite peculiar, don’t you agree?” I snapped my claws. “I got some pinchers here I use to grab food and fight predators for. They’re not something I agreed to have, nature just gave them to me. But nature didn’t really give you love. Nature’s not telling you to say I love you to your partner and offspring every day, either. And there is no force on Earth making you have to stay with the same partner your whole lives, too.”

“I agree, little lobster,” he said. “But something in me wants to do all those things.”

“Could it be the way you were raised? A creature’s perspective on the world heavily depends on how they were raised. The conventions they’re used to are passed on.”

“You know, that could certainly be it, little lobster. When I was young, my mother and father told me I needed to find a wife and stick with her till the end of time. It’s all I can do now, I can’t think of anything else.”

“You stick with your mantras, and I stick with mine. Have a great day, good sir.”

“Deal, little lobster! And you as well!”

Every stranger I have met so far has been very nice, aptly so, for this innocent and quiet little town. It was as if a shell-collector picked the prettiest shells out of a dirty beach and dumped them all into one spot. Thus has lead me to begin searching for more people to chat with, especially those adept at chatting. My next temporary companion was an old, scruffy man with an untrimmed beard and tattered clothes sleeping on a bench in the middle of the street, in broad daylight. I found it very silly and so I took it upon myself to climb up to his height on the bench--which took numerous effortful attempts of trial and error, a very arduous struggle getting up on the bench conventionally designed for larger creatures as a small lobster, indeed--and delivered to him a very mild pinch with my claw to wake him up. He fought off his sleep slowly, getting up with the speed of a blue whale, rubbing his eyes. “Oh, hello,” he said when he saw me.

“What are you doing, good sir?” I asked.

“I am taking a nap.”

“Is that not odd? I see everyone else at this time awake and about, doing business, doing errands, doing work. Why do you choose this time, of all times, to sleep?”

“I am conserving my energy. I do not have a job, or a better place to sleep. But you are right. Usually, everyone sleeps at night, when the sun goes down, when the sky turns dark. Then they wake up when the sun returns the next morning.”

“Why do you sleep when the sun goes down and the sky turns dark?”

“I don’t know.”
“I am tired of you humans not knowing.”

These humans were helpless in the understanding of their own world that they have created for themselves. It roused inner laughter within me to imagine how these creatures could even survive, when they certainly did so vainly, yet were inept at explaining things thoroughly. They slept at night because they declared it was the time to do so? Very interesting. I have a minute understanding that it may also be influenced by certain circadian rhythms that most surface-dwelling creatures on this planet have, but humans were intelligent enough to decide when to sleep themselves, proven by this one man on the bench, and they still sometimes chose day as if it was the right decision. Bats also certainly proved it did not have to be. Granted, they do find a dark cave when they sleep. They also prefer the night to avoid predators and competition with birds. But ignore those natural benefits and impediments, and you are left with the actual decision itself to sleep when you would like, and humans chose nighttime. They were used to it, I suppose. They could not imagine a world of anything else.

After thanking the man on the bench for a good chat, we parted ways. My journey resumed when I found an odd little building called a church, designed differently than all the other buildings. Its window frame patterns were substantially more intricate. It was tall but thin at the centre and low and wide at the bottom. Through the window I could see that inside the room at the very top housed a giant black bell. Jagged, pointy triangles decorated the roof, which was yet another human convention I had many questions for. The whole building was painted white with the edges and roof black. The walls were bumpy, the surface of slanted wooden planks like the blinds of a window angled and not fully flat--again another reasoning left as an unanswered mystery. When I entered I was met with a solemn atmosphere full of pious humans on wooden pews, a reverence in the air I have never seen anywhere else, as if this kind of traditional respect was reserved for the most ultimate of human things, such as a church. Light sifted through the glass windows, shining on the believers. A giant wooden cross was fixed to the wall at the very back, pinned to it by nails a man with long hair and lots of facial hair. Although it was a sculpture, not real, mind you, though gruesome the image was regardless. The man was looking at the floor, head low. His hands and feet were bleeding from the nails pinning him, red oozing out from his flesh. A crown made of thorns was on his head, so sharp it cut through his forehead and caused bleeding there too. It was all, once again, odd to me. Yet brazenly curious. Then there was a man in white robes at the very back, facing everyone else behind an altar, who was holding two things up in the air, one a large circular disc of unleavened bread, the other a golden wine cup filled with red wine. He was humming a tune with a deep, powerful voice, and when he spoke the crowd responded with words readily as if they had been prefabricated, and when he sung the crowd sang along, knowing the lyrics by heart. It was a beautiful sight, and I found all the practices and routines attractively fascinating, electrifying, moving! No such compelling sights existed at the bottom depths of the ocean. Back where I am from, we did not pray to a higher being or sing songs about praising them at all. All we did was search for our next meal, defecate, and sleep. Pray no predators came, I suppose. To nothing but the Ocean, or Mother Earth. Perhaps we would go on an occasional wandering of the ocean floor. We had little to no pastimes. But never in my short existence have I seen something so odd, so human, so intelligent! A tradition refined over centuries and counting until it seemed nothing but absolutely necessary and conventional.

I saw endless examples of this in the later stages of my journey. The fact that I was told by some children on the street that humans declared vanilla and chocolate, one a spice and the other butter from a bean seed, as opposites--intriguing! The idea that all of them did not know how to walk at birth, and they had to learn, and now they all balanced on their two legs without a second thought as if the most normal and easy thing in the world--marvellous! My questions about it all begged to be answered! Why was this like that, why was that like this, why, why, why?

A little ways past the church was a quiet field littered with square stones that I learned was called a graveyard. Or, a little confusingly, the locals gave me other answers, such as a cemetery or a churchyard. It was yet another pointless problem of the human lexicon’s semantics. The words were supposedly individual; one could carefully choose the diction based on the style of the yard or its vicinity to holy places such as, well, a church. But at the same time I noticed they all used the words interchangeably. I could not tell if it was a result of uneducated brains, or another example of being a common human unknowing of the way their world worked. I read a sign at the entrance to the place that said burial grounds were preferred to be near churches because the purity of the soils near it guaranteed and validated souls to this place they said they would eternally rest in peace. It was quite the amusing thought experiment. A lobster like me could not help but wonder if I was allowed in the place as well. Or were the humans too anthropocentric to even consider I had a soul? Do I have a soul? I did not know the answer myself. But at least the humans seemed sure they did.

I walked by the blocks of stone called tombstones--or gravestones, yet again the problem arose. The air was still here and it was silent enough to hear the wind ruffle the leaves of the oak trees. The place had an eerie, solemn aura, compelling me in unexplainable ways to be immensely reverent. As I passed by the tombstones--of which were coloured either light grey, dark grey, or reddish granite--I read the words on them. They contained the names of the deceased people, a little about them, and the dates they were born and died. It was heartbreakingly bizarre to think that I was possibly standing above their dead bodies as I read, in my mind split between an image of a skeleton or a full, undecayed and intact corpse resting below me. I could not decide which was uncannier. Even so, regardless of detail, the truth was I was amazed at such an idea of burying the dead and forming a sort of memorial for them with these stones. These stones that would, theoretically and supposedly, last here longer than them when they were alive, dozens of lifetimes after their deaths on this fragile sphere of rock and water. To think that descendants of the future would be able to come here and read about their distant ancestors, to remember them and feel a little warmth of their spirits. I was mad about the idea. My little lobster brain had trouble comprehending why these humans would do such a thing, to try to make themselves eternal in the face of endless impermanence of the universe. So I decided to ask this lovely older lady who was standing over a particular tombstone, holding a couple of small flowers in her hands.

“Excuse me, ma’am. Why do you humans remember your dead in this fashion? Back where I come from, this is all unheard of.”

She faced me. “Hello, little lobster. You’re asking why we honour our dead?”

“Yes.”

“It’s strange, I suppose, when you think about it, really. I know you lobsters don’t do it. The way I see it, we do it because we love them.” She gestured to the flowers in her hand. “I’m here to give flowers to my husband. He died a year ago battling cancer.” She kneeled down in front of the tombstone and muttered something I could not quite hear. Then she placed the flowers gently in front of it. When she stood back up, I noticed a droplet of liquid fall from her closed eyes and run down her cheek.

“What is that?” I asked, pointing to it with my claw.

“It’s a tear,” she said. “You shed it when you miss your dead loved ones. Like my husband right now.”

“It’s very interesting to learn your culture.”

“I’d assume so. It’s a lot different than where you’re from, right?”

“Right. Very foreign. But interesting nonetheless. Do you all shed a tear for your dead loved ones?”

“All of us.”

“Without fail?”

“Without fail.”

The graveyard, the burying of the dead, the woman staying because of love and being sad because of it too--it was all shenanigans to me. It made no sense to me why these people did it all. But something about seeing the lady stand there with her eyes closed in total silence, as if feeling the presence of her dead husband and shedding a tear or two here and there for him, was enthralling. Here I was, captivated, riveted, engrossed! I surprise myself sometimes. Shortly after the brief chat with the lady, I thanked her and we parted ways as I left the graveyard. She decided to stay there longer to spend more time with her husband. It was so strange to see someone make that decision. It held no practicality in her life, only wasting an hour or two of her time, but she abandoned all logic anyway and made that decision. I could not hope to understand it myself, but if this behaviour for all humans was true, like she had promised, then there must be something deep down in it that is real. 

My next stop was a cafe. The sun was on its way to setting and it was going to get dark soon, my time was ticking away slowly. I was feeling tired, needed a good place to rest for a small while, and I felt the moisture in me draining. Not at an alarming level yet, but impeding nevertheless. I waited in front of the cafe for someone to open the door for me. When a woman from the inside did, the door chimed bells as I scurried in quickly. There was a line to order, and since I had no hope in joining it due to my size, I found a small, round table to sit at with a tall chair I had to strenuously climb up. I was aware that the convention here was to enter the line, wait until it was your turn like a queue, and order at the counter, but I acted as a lobster unknowing of that, and soon enough it paid off when a barista lady in a green apron uniform chose compassion and personally went over to my table to ask for my order.

“Oh, you poor lobster!” she said, taking out a notepad and pen. She was on the younger side, perhaps still a student--a term I had learned from talking to strangers on the street earlier, who had explained to me that humans ended up going to institutions when they were older to learn about various things, like exactly why awnings were striped. “What would you like this afternoon? Coffee?”

“Coffee?” I was interested. “Sure, please.”

“How do you want your cream and sugar?” asked the barista lady. 

“How do I want it?” I exclaimed, curling my antennae. “Lady, you’re making me moult here! Please just bring me a coffee.”

“A double double? They’re very popular here.”

“A double double! What in the Five Oceans is a double double?”

“Sorry if I’m troubling you, sir. So do you just want plain, black coffee?”

“Whatever coffee is, just bring it to me!”

Coffee turned out to be a bitter and rather unexciting drink, even after adding the cream and sugar packs the barista lady suggested me to. It was lame in experience and harsh in taste. Foreign and absorbing. It carried with it a form of energy, for after finishing my cup I felt refreshed and no longer exhausted. I spent the rest of my time at the table pondering, daydreaming, and occasionally watching the humans get upset over a wrong order or silently listening to something on their headphones as they typed away on their laptops. Headphones were fascinating to me. It was truly one of the greatest feats of innovation, the idea of being in a public space with your own private world of music or sounds without anyone else knowing what they were, unbothered. The humans had many big achievements, but tiny ones like these tended to go unnoticed.

“Do you want the bill and the machine?”

I turned to see the barista lady, whom I had not noticed had come to me. I did not know what either term meant, but I told her yes just to please her, a conflicting decision rising in me between whether I should keep my innocent and unaware lobster facade, only effective if the barista lady found me cute, or not, to be genuine. She returned shortly with an ominous-looking black device almost half the size of me. “You can pay as soon as you’re ready,” she said, handing it to me.

“I don’t know what paying is,” I admitted. A screen on the device instructed me to keep pressing the green circle button, so I kept doing so until it asked me what percent I wanted to tip.

“That’s OK. Maybe you can come back another time with your card? Or with some cash?”

“What is a tip?” I asked, showing her the screen on the device.

“People give tips when they pay for something. They decide how much they want to give based on how happy they are from the service of a place.”

“You gave me exceptional service, I will tip you a lot, then.”

“Thank you, sir. But you still cannot pay, I don’t see money on you, or even a bag. I’ll put it on your tab.”

“Whatever a tab is, whatever that means, sure, do it.” I paused, feeling another rant within me coming like the magma flow of an undersea volcano. “Back where I’m from, when you get your food, usually after catching it yourself, you don’t pay for it at all! You just eat it and move on with your day! Who invented this paying thing anyway? Who even enforces it? And why do they? Who tells them to? And why do they tell them to?”

“I don’t know, sir,” she said nonchalantly, as if this was something she experienced every day. “But don’t worry about paying for now. Come back tomorrow to pay, if you’d like.”

I left the cafe with no plans of ever returning. The sun was now beginning to set and the day was nearly ending. My day at this town was reaching its conclusion yet I was still not satisfied. So interesting were the ways of these humans that I longed to stay with them a moment longer. But my body was drying up and my time here was fleeting. While walking on the sidewalk, I saw a hulking vehicle others told me was called a bus making its way uphill to a spot where a few people were waiting behind a posted sign. I joined them in waiting. When the bus came to a stop in front of us, twin doors on its side opened up, giving way to the inside. I noticed that everyone outside halted all movement to let those that wanted to exit the bus do so first, before moving in, which I found to be yet another striking convention. I followed them in, hopping the big steps of the interior. All the people in front of me put small pieces of metal into a box, clinking as it hit the bottom, or scanned a plastic card by placing it flat against a surface. When it was my turn, I told the bus driver, “Put it on my tab.” He only laughed and told me to move on and not worry about it. I watched every new passenger spill like water as they chose empty seats to sit on. I did the same. They seemed to gravitate to seats not close to any other people, which I wondered if it was another convention. My seat was closer to the front of the bus, and its front faced this wide, open area where I found a man in his seat and his dog resting in the area in front of him. The bus began to hum and move as it pulled away from the stop, ready to efficiently transport us a large distance in record time.

For most of the ride, as I rested on a seat meant for a much bigger creature than I was, I watched the man and his dog. But truth to be told, I forgot all the features and details about the man, because something was so compelling about the dog that my attention was primarily focused on it. It was a brown labrador retriever. It had a black pack wrapped around its body with big white letters on it that said, “POLICE.” It was on its belly, its legs splayed out in front and to the side of him, its head down low against the floor of the bus. It seemed so relaxed as the bus hummed and bumped up and down, feeling content and comfortable with its owner, safe and at home. Such a thought moved me, the idea of an animal feeling so safe from the world. It was a feeling unknown where I came from, an emotion completely unfamiliar to the dwellers of the ocean. When the bus hit a large bump and jerked upward more than usual, the dog jumped up on its feet in a calm alarm, as if it was feeling danger and looking for it but knew there actually was not any. Its owner gave it a loving pet, rubbing its neck back and forth as its fur got messy. With this, the dog went back into a state of feeling protected and relaxed. But it continued to stand up to look out the big window of the bus. It stared out of it like an ocean current had swept it to another world, daydreaming silently as it gazed at the lights of the city that passed us by. It stayed there, unmoving, its eyes glowing a certain feeling of familiarity at the sight it was seeing, its tail immobile and emotionless. The rumble of the bus floor, the streaks of light flashing by parallel to the speed of the bus, and the brown labrador retriever staring out the human window in a human vehicle wearing a human pack looking at a human city all produced an image in my head I could not stop thinking about. This image of this dog looking at something that is civilization, the bus inertia moving it back and forth as it tried to keep balance, an animal not wild but tamed and now human, it was all so moving to me. A dog so conventionalized to humans, so engrossed and integrated into their ways and society, fitted for a lifestyle so dependent on their love.

After that surreal experience, I cannot say much else about the end of my adventure. I got off the bus and was in a city, one that I desire to explore, but decided it had to be another day because I really needed to return to the ocean. The temperature had cooled significantly from the heat of this morning. The sun was in the middle of setting, creating a streak of twilight pink across the horizon, and I found my way to a big body of water--which I determined was the same ocean I had come from with my lobster salinity-testing techniques--as I prepared to say one last goodbye to the humans. I looked at the boats on the water again, and this time, I decided that the humans on them should be the ones humbled because they needed them to be in the water, while sea creatures like me, a lobster, did not need them at all to explore the ocean freely. So much technology just to mimic the power of a fish! How clueless they were! Then my thoughts drifted to what would happen once I returned to the ocean, back to my lobster friends. I would tell them about everything I had learned from this visit, of course. Surely, they would have a million questions about the humans as well. Also, who knows, maybe I will follow that one lady’s advice and invent something, forcing all of them to memorize its name, as well as their descendants.

I said a final farewell to the humans as I slowly waded back into the water, wishing them all the best of luck in all their future endeavours. It was turning dark, the fireflies were coming out, and my time was up. The sunset was probably the last thing I saw before letting the waves engulf me. We animals may have lots of differences with the humans, but I suppose a sight like this was something that connected us all.

The last thought of mine, however, as I entered the water, was nothing but the dog on the bus again. Again, somehow, it surfaced to the top reaches of my mind and bubbled, clambering for attention. Even as it did so, the unmistakable sign of my yearning to think about it seemed to show itself. The journey was over. Yet, in my mental window, this insignificant little dog seemed to settle wayside to the outer and central banks of my memory, taking hold everywhere as it suspired life into my imagination, filling me with so great a force of awe, marvel, and wonder. The image manifested brilliantly, the dog innocently there once more, watching the window, the lights a blur. The bus on a bumpy road, it mindlessly keeping balance on its paws, decently composed. Minutes passing by as it remained like this uncomplainingly, holding a specific serenity powered by the safe comfort of the humans. O yes, it seemed to say, I am a part of this conventionalized world; humans are born knowing to pet me and play with me as if the most ordinary thing of all time. This dog on the bus carried with it a familiarity in an unfamiliar world, more so than a sunset that all creatures on the planet could see. It was a particular image that would linger on my mind during the last few days of my delicate lobster life on the undersea floor.

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