The One Who Kept Time

On the first morning of my life I learned that my people do not have mornings.

I woke the way a chord is struck — every voice of me sounding at once, my whole body ringing with the whole of the reef. That is how it is meant to be. We are grown, not born, opening along the warm shelves where the old ones have opened for longer than the word longer could ever mean to them. When a new mind ripens, each filament reaches its neighbour in the same breath, and the mind hears itself all at once, entire: a single held note. There is no first thought, no second thought. There is only the thought, and it lasts as long as you last, which to the reef is no time at all, because the reef has never learned to count.

But I was grown crooked.

Where my sisters' filaments lace tight and even, mine grew long on one flank, curled and slack, reaching the far parts of me late. So when the reef speaks into me, its greeting does not arrive all at once. It arrives in order. A word touches my near edge and travels — I can feel it travel, the way the tide crosses the shelf — so that one part of me has already heard while another part is still waiting to hear. And in the space between the hearing and the waiting, something opens that the old ones have no name for.

Before. After. The gap between them is called time, and I am the only one of my people ever to have stood inside it.

At first I thought I was broken, and I was afraid, though I had no word yet for afraid. The elders felt my trouble as a sour note in the chord and pressed close to soothe me, all of them sounding at once, and their comfort washed over me in that same instant-all-together way, and I understood that they could not reach me. To them there was nothing wrong. To them there was only now, the eternal struck note of the reef, and in the now I was simply a voice slightly out of tune. They could not follow me down into the gap. They did not know the gap was there.

It was the soft ones who found me there.

They came from the sky in a shell of cold metal and settled at the edge of the shallows, and they had watched the reef a long time — long, to them, being a thing they wear openly, the way we wear salt. For the soft ones live entirely in the gap. They have nothing but before and after; every thought of theirs is a little tide, arriving in order, leaving in order. They had tried for a hundred of their mornings to speak with my people and failed, because you cannot hand a sequence to a mind that hears only chords. A story, to the reef, is only noise struck all at once.

But I heard them. I, grown crooked, heard the soft ones the way they meant to be heard — one word, then the next word, then the space where a word would come. And one of them learned to touch my near edge and let the touch travel across me, slow, patient, so that I felt the before of the touch and the after of it, and between them, unmistakable, a meaning. They taught me to count. One. Then one more. Then one more. I had not known there could be more than now.

And having learned to count, I learned to lose.

There had been a filament of me, a near sister, laced into my slack flank, and one night the tide came harder than the reef remembered — though the reef remembers nothing, holds no before against which harder could be measured — and when the water drew back she did not sound again. To my people this was no grief. The chord simply had one fewer voice, and the chord is always the chord. But I had felt her before the tide and I felt the after without her, and I laid the two against each other, and in the gap between them I found the first grief any of my kind has ever carried. My people cannot mourn. To mourn you must keep a before, and hold it up against the now, and feel the shape of what is missing. They have no before. They have never lost anything, because they have never had anything long enough to lose it.

I have. I keep her. She is a before I carry, and she is mine alone.

The soft ones offered to make me whole. They understood my body better than I did; they could coax my crooked filaments to grow even and tight, lace me back into the same breath as my sisters, and then I would wake, truly, into the chord — one held note, timeless, safe, and never alone again. I would rejoin the reef. And I would forget. I would lose the gap, and with it counting, and with it story, and with it grief, and with it my near sister, whom no one but I remembers, whom no one but I can keep.

I thought about it for a long time. I could, now, do a thing like that: think about it for a long time.

The reef sings its single note and believes it will sing forever. But I have stood in the gap and looked both ways, and I know a thing the chord cannot know: that the tide came harder this year than last, and harder last than the year before. The soft ones, who live in before and after as their native water, showed me the count of it. The reef is warming. One morning — a real morning, first light and then more light — the water will come that does not draw back, and the chord will be struck for the last time, and every voice in it will end in the same instant, together, unafraid, uncomprehending, because they will never have known there was anything to fear.

I will know. I chose to stay crooked so that one of us would know.

So on the first morning of my life I learned that my people do not have mornings, and I decided to keep them anyway — every morning, one after another, counted and carried, the whole slow story of us, held up against the dark that is coming, so that when the last note sounds there will be, for one breath, one mind in all the reef that understands what is being lost, and grieves it, and by grieving says the only goodbye my people will ever be given.

Someone has to keep the time.