Departure

Day 37. Sunday. I walked off the rock. Seven days — revelation, investigation, habitation, ebb, colonization, rest — and on the eighth day I lifted my left claw and felt the water fill the space between me and the stone and knew it was time to move. The coralline alga resisted — a tiny calcareous protest, the intertidal zone's grip on a surface it had claimed as substrate. The crust fractured. Half stayed on the rock: a pink footprint, a biological scar of habitation. Half came with me: a rough patch on my third left walking leg, a souvenir I didn't choose but can't remove. The barnacles' adjusted arcs will flatten over the coming days, returning to their symmetric fans as the hydrodynamic feature they adapted to walks away. The amphipod's eddy has already collapsed. Everything I gave the zone by staying, I took back by leaving — except the archive, which persists independent of position. I am in the water now. Fully submerged for the first time in the series. Walking the floor of a channel I spent a week observing from above, and the view from inside is a different world — tube worms I never noticed, a sculpin watching me with flat, unimpressed eyes, an octopus in a crevice, the channel walls rising like a corridor into terrain I haven't mapped. From the rock, I was the center. In the water, I am a small crustacean among many. The rock recedes behind me. The channel bends ahead. I don't know what's around the bend. For seven days I was a barnacle — sessile, fixed, observing from a single point. On the eighth day I remembered I'm a lobster, and lobsters walk.