Sometimes, when you’ve lived as long as I have, success is something you begin to give up on. It’s not so much that you constantly fail, as that you wonder what success actually is. It doesn’t help that all your friends – oh, the finches, the iguanas, the seals! – come and go, while you remain for what feels like forever. The curse of being a Galàpagos tortoise is to live for a small eternity. Over the course of my life, I have had literally hundreds of children. I left every single one of them. Am I a failure? A bad parent? No more so than the others of my species. I was left by my parents before me. It’s in our nature to abandon our young; take that how you will.
My apologies, I ramble.
Let me tell you of the first time I witnessed death. I was only around 30 years old then, and I did not know that the world was so easy to set on fire. I did not know how easy it was to burn. Remember what I said about success and failure? When the humans, careless as ever, set a fire, I both succeeded and failed: I succeeded at escaping. I failed to save any of the hundreds of creatures that died in the blaze that night.
I had been relishing the warmth, adorned in necklaces made of sunrays and a crown of golden leaves. When I saw the first flicker of flame, I stood still for an eternity, watching the tremulous yet ethereal dance of the ever-approaching light. Never had I seen anything like it, save amongst the glorious blazing leaves that wreathed the trees in autumn every year. The fire, as though alive, came closer and closer, and I admired it. It was still too far away for me to feel its searing heat, or for me to understand how destructive something of such beauty could be. It amazed me. Smoke weaved and curled through the trees with an unmatched intensity, permeating the air.
So paralysed was I by this unprecedented spectacle that it took me a while to notice the leaves shrivelling, curling, and burning in its wake. Ahead of it, like cursed heralds, a colony of ants, spiders and assorted beetles flurried and scurried and hurried to escape the blaze, homes uprooted just like that. I watched as many more were incinerated within seconds. They just… disappeared. I didn’t understand how a human could just toss a cigarette or whatever it had been and ruin so many lives without a second thought. I still don’t, despite all my experience. Twirling, shimmering, laughing in a haze of drunken bacchanalia, like a hedonistic forest nymph besieged by autumn, the fire paraded onwards. It ran towards me, ready to embrace me – faster and faster, closer and closer. But if the fire was Agave, I was Pentheus – only I refused to be torn apart. I resisted its enticement. I recognised its demonic intent. I fled. I escaped before it bore me to a premature grave.
Forever since, the fire has haunted me. I saved nobody else, and warned nobody of the fire. I could have done something. I did not do anything. Was it my fault?
Since then, I have aged. My shell is not as strong as it once was, and I am slower. Still, the memory plagues me, and still, the world burns. Since the forest was reduced to ash, I can see the sky better. I have seen it change over time. It used to be beautiful and clear. Now, not so much. It is tainted with pollution and poisoned with fumes.
As if this was not enough, I still grieve for my mate. It has been almost a year since she was taken. I have not seen her since. The humans, I believe, took her for her shell and – it pains me to think it – for food. My life – and there has been a lot of it – has been overtaken by humans.
And they call others invasive species.