There was this story I was told, when I was a kid.

A beautiful woman, with eyes as deep as the sea, dancing on a moonlit shore; then she'd wear an enchanted seal's skin—her true skin—and dive into the sun-kissed waves at the break of dawn.

A silkie. A legend, a myth.

We have plenty in Scotland. But that's just what they are: fairy tales.

Pollution was also a fairy tale. One I've known all my life, something I used to hear from teachers or from the news, and never really gave a true afterthought to it. Something abstract, distant, inexperienceable.

Until now.

Now I know that fairy tales are as real as I am. Flesh and blood—verbatim.

And this isn't even the most amazing part! Legends, bed-time stories... they're all true, and they can annihilate one other, fatal like air to mothballs. Like humans to everything they touch.

We are reverse Midases—turning things into dust, into nothingness.

After all, some stories spill from our own pen, but they're written in red blood instead of black ink. Pollution, we made it up. But unlike fairies, it didn't waste away because of lack of faith. We nourished it with the indifference we spare for all made-up stories and it grew, swelling like a rotted corpse.

Like this rotted corpse.

A true silkie, killed by true pollution. 

Who said a bullet is more lethal than a plastic bag? No, you needn't a gun or a blade, a sack can do as well. Or a thousand.

I'm mesmerized by the heavy flipper of the silkie, hitting my feet over and over, pushed by tide. She tried to escape her own dying seal's skin, but suffocated before she could shed it completely. The scintilla of life in her bulging brown eyes—still visible through the clear and thin wrap—switched off.

I'm not a kid anymore. Pollution cannot be ostracized from my responsability-immune life, not now that its consequences lie at my feet. I don't put the blame on anyone but me—I could have done something. I could have tried, at least. All of us could. Should.

I remove the plastic from her face, gently, like petting a small child. I wave my fingers through the dark, shimmering mane as I free her human husk from it. Then I take a last shallow breath, and slip into the enchanted seal's skin.

So I swim, without looking back—ever.

If I'm going to live at all, I won't do it as a human. Not anymore. I will experience all the pain and the carelessness I inflicted upon other creatures like the silkie. To not forget what it means to be them. I will help them, one piece of plastic at a time.  

I will use this chance to change: myself, my actions.

I will use this chance to clean: my soul, our world. 

I will use this chance to celebrate: life.