I think I am in my whale shark era.

It began small, a stuffed whale shark in a zoo gift shop, its skin dotted with tiny white stars, and I felt something in me recognize it. Not joy, not comfort, not surprise, but recognition, as if a part of me that had always existed far below the surface had finally surfaced just enough to say, yes, this is what I am. Something immense. Something patient. Something that moves slowly and carries the weight of its own existence without asking for notice.

Whale sharks are the largest fish in the ocean, and yet they do not dominate. They move like time itself, deliberate, mouths open, letting the water pass through them. They do not chase. They do not fight. They do not hurry. They do not need to be understood. They glide through currents that would crush anything else, and still they are gentle. I have fallen in love with their enormity, with the quiet certainty of their being.

Their backs are painted with constellations, a thousand tiny stars scattered across vast, dark skin. No two patterns are the same. They carry the sky on their bodies, a universe in motion, traveling alone through oceans that stretch farther than the mind can hold. And I think of myself like that sometimes—alone, yes, but not lost, marked with constellations that only I can see, carrying my own silent light through waters that are deep and unknowable.

I have carried so much already. Loss, exhaustion, nights where the silence pressed against me and I thought I might break. I have braced myself for the world to take what it wanted, and still, here I am. Still, I am moving. Still, I am learning how to let the weight exist without breaking me, how to float in it, how to let the current carry me.

There is awe in that stillness. There is awe in being so large, so slow, so deliberate, and so alone, and yet so fully alive. There is awe in the constellations that mark a creature’s skin, in the way the stars travel with it even when no one else can see. I want that for myself. I want to be immense and quiet and star-marked, to move through the dark water and let it hold me, to let the depth exist without shame or explanation, to let the currents trace the shape of my body and the shape of my scars and the shape of everything I have learned to carry.

Even in the silence, even far below the surface where no one notices, the stars still take note.

I want my life to feel like that. I want to glide through it with the vastness of the ocean in my chest, carrying constellations across my back that no one can ever fully map but that are there anyway, that shine anyway, that mark me as real and enduring. I want to move slow, I want to hold weight without apology, I want to exist with patience, with awe, with quiet light, with the kind of presence that does not need to be witnessed to be real.

This is my whale shark era.

Vast and patient, gentle and immense, alone but full of constellations, moving through dark water without spectacle. Letting the stars mark me, letting the ocean hold me, letting the silence shape me. Letting myself exist without explanation. Letting the awe of it reach me, all of me, until even I can see it, even I can feel it.

Even here, far below the surface, even in solitude, even in silence, the stars still take note.