Dear Susanna

A Story by Alessa Jordin

Dear Susanna,
My darling wife, it has been far too long since last we met, before the savages.
It started deep in the ocean, did it not? When you were a fish, and I a lowly ocean’s atom. I circulated there for a long time, searching for you, but you were gone. You’d died as part of that fish, but of one much larger, with a joy for eating smaller animals. That fish was large, but it wasn’t immortal as we found ourselves to be.
You’d have loved where I went next,in my sorrow, thinking you were gone forever. My journey led me upward, through the upwelling process.It was lovely there. The fish, the plants, everything; they were beautiful, but I only longed for your company.
And eventually I was stolen up again, used by an animal, not unlike you were when my waters first surrounded you. It sent me to the atmosphere, a pretty crowded and much unloved place, most of its inhabitants struggling helplessly to leave. I didn’t mind it, but I couldn’t stay. My search―my quest―for you knew no rest, Susanna.
I returned to the surface ocean, used by an ugly green sea-most that called itself algae. It, like every plant I’ve encountered before or since, was giving off oxygen, which I didn’t much care about until it gave me away as well. It simply allowed me, one of its only companions, to be stolen away.
I found myself back in the atmosphere and said to myself, "I like this place," which wouldn’t matter if I’d said or not, but I wanted to say it out loud, in front of witnesses, just for public record. It was later recounted to me that a fish had breathed me in and used me up; a fish I thought was you for many a year.
And then there I was again. I was in that lovely place, with the fish and the the plants and the everything: the surface ocean.The most unlikely thing happened there. I saw you. It was you! We wed that night, for my fear of losing you was too great. I was an ugly green plant again, but this one didn’t give me away willingly, and neither did you. I was torn from it, and you, screaming. Not that the animal that ate me heard my screaming; I was just doing it for public record. Alas, my screams took me no place I wanted to be. Instead, they were a trail a nobler atom might have followed back to you.
Eventually, as all things but our love do, the creature―the horrible, wretched cretin―died away. It fell back into the deep, where we first met, and I’ve even reason to believe that the entirety of the cretin’s species has done the same. Good riddance.
The words I need to write my farther pleasure on this course fail me, so I’ll leave them for now. Perhaps you will receive another letter from me, my dearest. Perhaps.
With agonizing love,
Arthur Cabbott