After scrambling up the sand dunes, we hurriedly kicked off our flip-flops and let the embrace of the sea’s salted perfume hold us for a beat. Finally, repose.

A few times each summer between ages 10 and 18, I’d cram into the back seat of a Subaru Forester as my family trekked up the meandering coast of Florida. We’d stray from the urban hive of Miami and stay in odd little beach towns close to whatever baseball tournament site my brother’s team decided on for a night or two or three. For my brother: a chance to improve his “craft.” For me: a chance to enjoy a beach that wasn’t overflowing with tourists.

Usually, we could expect a few curious sights spread stranded on the tapestry of sand: stray mangrove propagules, man of wars’ slick tentacles trailing in the sand, beachcombing sandpipers fishing ghost crabs from their burrows. This time, though, the sand seemed to have a translucent skin blanketing it in its entirety. Closer, closer, and I saw—there they were, moon jellies littered across the beach by the dozen, their sizzling skin glossy in the radiance of day.

The sight was as slippery as their forms, sliding through the fingers of my understanding and into the inscrutable. Growing up wading through mangroves in Miami and making pilgrimages to the Everglades every so often, jellyfish had become familiar friends—there was something sweet in their way of plopping across the ocean, a charm to how they pulsed through the lull of the current. In their smoothness,innocence: pale expanses of skin, unbroken by mouths or eyes or noses.  Free of tangled knobs of bone or muscle, they roam that ocean’s inky depths as simple, primordial alien beauties But there they were. In the midst of what was supposed to be a serene beach afternoon—nothing out of the ordinary— lacy tendrils were raked across the sand and reduced to molten masses by the searing grip of midday’s blaze.

The ritual of a fun day at the beach was immediately offset by their presence (and their absence from the sea). Laying our towels across the sand, my family and I had to shimmy jellyfish out of the nearby area. The excitement and anticipation of setting up camp had been squashed. I couldn’t focus on finding rocks to weigh down the towels’ edges, or scooping sand away to make room for an umbrella, or laying out snacks and pre-packaged sandwiches to enjoy later. It was all sucked up and swallowed by the sensation of brushing the jellies off, moving them away to die somewhere they wouldn’t be such a nuisance. Best not to get stung, mom said. Meanwhile, the jellies burned and bloated.

Sun’s kisses warm and freckle my skin but scorch theirs, 

Blistering blubber liquifying in the sand

Their fleshy bodies boil, popping and squelching,

The sight commands my eye: “watch.”

How can such a sacrilegious refrain exist in the sea’s timeless song? 

I watch their surrender with bated breath,

Torn from the tender chill of their abyssal kingdom

Scorching, slipping

Eternal monarchs of the depths are reduced to a fleshy film skinned across the sand,

splotches of their dainty bodies, the orange and black and white of the

milkweed wanderers’ patchwork wings

Here they lie, wounded

And somehow those around are none the wiser.

Only one species of jellyfish holds the key to biological immortality, yet this sense of eternity marked these moon jellies nonetheless. Seeing these creatures, primordial pouches of salt and sea and air, seared into the sand en masse was crushing. I gave into the immediate urge to save them, or to try. I couldn’t deliver them back to the sea, not all of them, but no one is so wise in a moment where little lives are being hung out to dry in concert.

It was impossible to do anything more than wade into the water until it lapped at shin level. Any deeper and it’d be hard to dodge the jellies; any shallower and stray jellies could sting in massive clumps. I wasn’t really interested in swimming, anyhow.

I spent the better half of the day scrambling to return the moon jellies to their murky homes, little fingers gripping tight to their sides and pushing them onto makeshift shovel-gurneys before letting them sink into the current. Each jelly returned promised temporary relief, each plunk, a burning hope that they’d be swallowed back into the sea’s benthic belly. Back and forth and back and forth across the sand, I tried to coax nature to welcome her delicate drifters back. But whipping brine and breeze delivered more with each passing minute.

Parentally-imposed intermittent breaks only aggravated my panic. I had to reapply sunscreen. Mother’s gentle hands spread the lotion on my knobby knees, wiggled it into my ears. I wasn’t having it. There was no time to worry about whether I’d burn or freckle when the moon jellies before me were being charred to a crisp.

But they just kept coming. Before the sight of them sinking, slipping, softening into the grains of the beach, my resolve faded. For me and my tender heart of 14, it was a tragedy of the commons, a colossal affront to eternal creatures. Is this how their waltz in the sea should end?

For the stray beach-goers, the sight yielded no special reaction, just a glance and dismissal. Had these jellies traversed thousands of miles of sea, woven through coral and human wreckage all the same, slipped beside the wings of manta rays, only to wash up at this beach and lay burning before me? It seemed unfitting, for such ancient beings to be cast ashore at the haphazard forces of unfortunate tides and weather. If the temperature or the salinity or the oxygen content of the waves would’ve been even slightly different, maybe it would’ve never happened. It felt like an affront to nature. These ghostly, marine butterflies should’ve been fluttering across the ocean, slithering wings kissing the tides. Their migration of the depths had been interrupted; chance had torn them from their path. There was a sense that something ancestral was ending, and that it mustn’t, but no one seemed to be paying any attention.

At least those visiting the beach would step around the jellyfish sputtering in the sand. Nature herself was not so kind. Sandpipers and seagulls picked at the creatures lazily; the sandpipers punctured their peeling skin with a sense of curiosity in each poke. The gulls, unwavering in their confidence, were not so timid; their beaks splintered flesh as they squawked at the melted bodies beneath. Such shrill cries were not enough to reanimate them, nor enough to morph them into a food the gulls would be satisfied with. Both birds plucked and snagged. They didn’t care for the taste or the texture, even less for the tragedy I saw before me.

Like her winged vessels, nature did not welcome my efforts either, not appreciating them but also not protesting. My scooping and shoveling and saving were not enough: the tide sent them in droves, little dandelion plumes of the sea flung far from home with the wind and the tides until there was no shortage of sizzling skin before the surf. In place of sand, the beach had become one giant sheet of bubble wrap, with the translucent dinner-plate-sized flying saucers crashing along the shore’s expanse. It made no difference what my hands or heart wanted; their dotted mesoglea, their spiked rhopalia, their oral arms and intricate canals of tissue were transformed into gnarled chunks of pinkish-purplish translucent flesh all the same. I stopped and wandered up the beach to sit amongst the dunes instead.

It was hard to even think of savoring the day. I couldn’t stomach the idea of playing in the sand, or indulging in the classic, crisp pop of frozen grapes under the balmy sun. The way the skin broke and the muddled insides came oozing out, the way the sand burned and bit at my toes—it was too much like the jellies. So, I sat. The relentless heartbeat of the waves was enough to lull me into a daze. Assuaged by the sea’s salted shroud, I took in the scene unfolding.

Whether the indifference was welcomed or not, the sight of the limp jellies began to register with as much shock as the sight of the gulls flittering above or the occasional splash of a fish breaking through the waves. It didn’t take long for reverence to eclipse the sense of latent danger: in its yielding grace, the ocean’s pulse spreads mangroves’ seed to the farthest stretches of land, sends morsels for crabs in their tunnels, and dispatches sea glass and fragments of shells to the shore, whispers from the brine. Equally, though, the sea rips tide-pool dwellers from their shelter, jostles albatrosses amongst howling tempest winds, even beaches dozens of jellyfish at a time.

Can things continue? Seagulls' caws rip through the sky’s azure, “They can, they can!” Human concepts of morality be damned, the sea shaped and shoveled and built oases with as much concern as she destroyed them. Violence could unfold and everything would continue regardless. The idea sat in my stomach, repeating in my mind until it sounded right: violence could unfold and everything would continue regardless. In turbulence, transformation; what a relief that something so large could happen and things can go on. In the internal compass of Earth’s winged nomads, in the emergence of sprouts in the spring, in the careful sculpting a river enacts on a canyon. There existed no spectrum of nobility and sin. Jumbled and indistinguishable and spectacular, it all just was. Violence shed its veil and revealed itself as indifference, beautiful and cruel all at once.

Stranded fae of the sea embraced by the cannibal well of the earth, did they yearn for escape?

Or was I only projecting

were the whisps of wind carrying to my ear words I was used to hearing?

Did I press my ear against the shell firmly enough, and hear my own

morals echoed back to me? 

Despite me, despite it all,

Molten jelly is drawn back into the hearth under nature’s impartial decree 

Their bodies dissolve before and between the

golden strand’s cradle,

sinking into sandy pearls, 

Becoming part of the whole again

And somehow,

somehow those around are none the wiser

what a relief.