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Whales<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n I know not to tell you that one day you’ll be better, <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Richard Lewis<\/strong> is a writer from Swansea currently residing in Cardiff. He was second prize winner of the Terry Hetherington Award, and has had work appear in publications including Cheval<\/em> and London Grip<\/em>. He is currently working on his debut poetry collection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Whales I know not to tell you that one day you’ll be better, so instead I tell you this: We are blue whales, we lie solitary on the ocean floor, looking up at a surface where life is nothing but silhouettes. I tell you I feed on white tablets of krill, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16420"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16420\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16829,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16420\/revisions\/16829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nso instead I tell you this: We are blue whales, we lie
\nsolitary on the ocean floor, looking up at a surface
\nwhere life is nothing but silhouettes. I tell you I feed
\non white tablets of krill, committing to the analogy,
\ntake them each morning with yesterday\u2019s water. They
\nkeep me anchored, low to the ground. Without them
\nI’d be battered by storms which rip metal from ships.
\nWithout them I’d be a husk; a carcass in the currents.
\nI tell you it’s nothing like this at all. But close enough.
\nNights down here will twist you until you snap; days
\nwill cut you off under the ice; every few seconds a sudden
\ndrop into remembering, so that you can never truly relax.
\nI know this doesn’t make you feel any better, that you think
\nyou belong down here, alone, and maybe you do. I know
\nyou think that it will never change, and maybe it won\u2019t. I know
\nhow easy it is to wrap yourself in the water and the silence
\nand forget. And so I tell you, instead, about the importance
\nof perspective. that you only appreciate the magnitude
\nof blue whales when you’re up close, when you can run
\nyour fingers over the old scars of their thick hide. Or when
\nthey venture out of the depths to pass ships. Finally, I tell you
\nthat I’m kept going by those moments: When a certain song,
\nsmile or break of sunlight calls me to the surface. And just for
\nthe briefest of moments, taking a deep breath, the cold air
\nstinging my lungs, the world says ‘welcome back’<\/em>.<\/p>\n