Once upon a time there was a whale who no one understood. She swam up and down the Pacific, calling out in a pitch so high that other whales ignored her. Once humans found her, they became fascinated—obsessed, even—but that meant nothing to her because she was a whale.
Once upon a time, there was also a girl. She lived by the ocean, and everyone thought she couldn’t speak, but really they just weren’t listening. Really, she was speaking, but she was speaking gale, a more evolved, higher frequency version of wind. Other humans didn’t know this, so they ignored her for a while, but then when she composed a song that was like nothing anyone ever heard before, they became fascinated—obsessed, even, but that meant nothing to her because she was only a child.
Before the other humans found the whale, the girl did. They would have conversations with each other every year when the whale migrated back to California about how weird it was being talked about in a language you didn’t speak, and they couldn’t see each other—only hear—but that didn’t matter.
“Oohhheeeuuuwaahhhh,” she said to the whale one day a few years after it had been found by humans, which meant, in human, I heard they are to be writing movies and songs about you now, the humans are.
“Eeeuuhhauuuuu,” said the whale, which, in human, meant Mostly indie ones so far.
“Euuu,” said the girl, “ohewaaaaaahhhh.” Yes, and you they’ve given a name to.
(Gale cannot be completely translated correctly into English, by the way.)
“Weeeeuuhhhhhaaaaa,” said the whale. 52 Blue, colloquially, though me they do not intimately innermost know to nickname such. I do not much like to it, being named by only my frequency.
“Yaawwwwww yeeehaaahhhh,” said the girl. They call you the loneliest one, but it is not actual truth. I know the real. They say the same about me, about me that my songs and I are loneliest. And then she added, “Eeeeyaaaah.” Which was the whale’s real name.
“Ooohyaaahaaaa,” said the whale, which was the girl’s real name, even though humans called her Stephanie Wallis. “Ohyaaaaah.” See you next year.
They grew older. The girl became a young woman. She composed songs and won awards, and humans continued to puzzle over her, only it did bother her now that she was grown. The whale was recorded many times with hydrophones, and humans wondered if she was deaf, or if she was a hybrid between a blue whale and a fin whale. They needed to categorize her and explain her.
Soon, it was ten years later. Scientists discovered, with hydrophones, that there was another whale elsewhere in the world who also called at 52 hertz.
Ooohyaaahaaaa was a little bit afraid, and while she waited for Eeeeyaaaah to come back that August, she composed a song about how it was always assumed by humans that if two members of a species had one unusual thing in common, that they would automatically be soulmates. She sang words in the song, but no one noticed—they just registered something unique but couldn’t pin it down. The song was named “Eeeeyaaaah, Ohyaaaaah,” which everyone thought was edgy. It went platinum.
Eeeeyaaaah, see you next year, humans across the world sang, but they didn’t even know the words they were saying. For all they knew, they could be saying, in gale, The old lady with cakes has already passed by. In Croatian human, that means the opportunity has passed. In English human, that means absolutely nothing.
“Eeeeyaaaah!” Ooohyaaahaaaa called out into the ocean that August.
“I love that song,” said a tall guy in surf shorts as he passed by. Stephanie Wallis looked at him in disgust. Though she did not like to be known only by her language and frequency, she still loved it and knew it was part of her.
“Wuuuoyohhhhh, Wuuuoyohhhhh!” Eeeeyaaaah answered. I’m here, you. I’m here, you.
“Yoyaaaahhhhh,” Ooohyaaahaaaa said, which, in human, means Them we do not need. “Yeeeaaahyaaaaa? Weeeyooooo?” she added. Did you meet the other whale of your frequency?
They were both tired of living in between, tired of being measured against human, but Ooohyaaahaaaa was anxious that the other whale would come between them.
“Yeeeeehaaaaaah,” said Eeeeyaaaah, which means, in human, no, but I do not need to meet that other. Don’t worry so humanly.
Ooohyaaahaaaa knew Eeeeyaaaah was right, because living among humans rubbed off on a being. It’s how humans wanted it.
“Oyahhhh yawaaa ahuuuuu?” they both asked. Can, finally, we see to one another with our eyes?
Ooohyaaahaaaa knew that Eeeeyaaaah could not walk, so, because she could swim, it would have to be her who went forward.
You shouldn’t live your life always waiting for just one part of a whole year to return, Ooohyaaahaaaa realized. Love wasn’t about body parts, or which holes a creature breathes from, or even songs. Songs come from longing and create longing and longing is nice but why couldn’t they just actually have? She walked into the water and as she did, her legs turned to fins—blue ones—and she kept swimming.
“Eeeeyaaaah!”
“Ooohyaaahaaaa!”
“Eeeeyaaaah!”
“Ooohyaaahaaaa!”
Humans call this Marco Polo, but this wasn’t a game and no one in this scenario was trying to spread Christianity to China, a human mistake.
When Eeeeyaaaah and Ooohyaaahaaaa finally saw each other, they both expected it to seem more different, but instead it barely mattered. What mattered was only that they didn’t need to wait a whole year to speak again.
You, I love, they said to each other in gale, but both of them would rather no humans knew the gale word for love, and hydrophones will never be able to translate it because, as you now know, gale can’t be completely translated into human, which is only fair. If you’re human, it’s not your place to wonder what it is—the gale word for love—to try to solve it until it’s yours. There is no gale word for “girl,” by the way, humans. You have your own words for love and for girl, and your own meanings, and your own rules, and your own morals, and you cannot have everything.
You cannot have everything.
What you can have is some songs you don’t quite understand, and your longing, and your human worry, and if that’s not good enough, listen harder and maybe, just maybe, you will hear something new.
Lindsay Sproul is a queer writer living with Ehlos Danlos syndrome. Her first book, We Were Promised Spotlights, was published by Putnam/Penguin in 2020, and her prose has appeared in Epoch, Witness, The Massachusetts Review, Ninth Letter and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from Columbia University, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Gullkistan Iceland and MacDowell and currently teaches at Loyola University New Orleans where she serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the New Orleans Review.