The salmon
A true salmon is immortal till the day it dies. Born to a fresh-water river, it grows then is washed downstream till it hits the ocean. Saltwater infiltrates every cell, burning the fish, reshaping it from within.
It then spends years in vast waters, learning everything there is to know about the deep, saltwater burrowing into every pore the salmon holds, living its life as it must and as it can until one day, years later, intentional or otherwise, the salmon turns around to seek the very same waters to which it was born.
A true salmon will survive each and every hardship that it leaves behind, and will survive each hardship that is to come. Every bump, scrape, and near death encounter.
On its way back the salmon, fuelled by instinct, enacted by what it believes to be its choice, leaps upstream. And understands something it would have never otherwise.
Upon leaping, it understands the truth. Its place in the grand scheme of things. Every trial and tribulation made the salmon what it is. That the divine always had a plan. That this salmon was destined to make that journey. That it did matter. Everything this fish has lived shaped it into the fish it is, and was, and is to be. The fish learned the divine is cruel, and feels shame in the understanding but ultimately hopes it will all be worth it.
It will finally find its river. It will spawn. Become mortal. Disintegrate. And die. She will nourish the river banks — and leave this realm at home.
The salmon surely found many truths along the journey, but the truth about the totality of her life will only be known when she arrives. You can't know everything until the journey is complete — like a painting, understood only when the last stroke is laid.
The salmon learns the cruelty of the divine later in the journey when her saline body burns in the baking sun as she leaps from the river current — the sun baking her watery retinas as she is held, suspended seemingly indefinitely in the air with knowledge she was barely ready for, fighting her way upstream — the hope that this moment will end fades as she inches unknowingly closer to the destination she's unsure she'll ever reach, and unsure again if it even exists anymore —
Then it stops.
It arrives.
The water is cool.
Our salmon is home.
Almost everything as it was all that time ago.
Only, the perception has changed.
The water is sweet. The burning has stopped.
Our salmon only now knows why it had to hurt, why it was worth the pain, when she finally becomes living just as the last great sorrow arrives — her time is short.
It is a softer cruelty — that the fish earned her mortality. And along with it, finally, her free will.
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