This is the second update from poets Anja Rockel and Laura Mijnders, who are each following a seal for a month at the Wadden Sea World Heritage Centre in Lauwersoog, as part of the project Writing with a Seal. Their observations form the basis for two poems that will be presented this autumn.
Laura is back from a week’s holiday and notices how much she had been looking forward to seeing Kiko and Addie again. In her absence, Kiko has been moved to phase three: he is being prepared for his release. ‘Somehow, that felt surprisingly quick,’ she writes. ‘Where does the time go? Addie is alone now. In a way I feel for him. Would he miss his companion?’
She spends much of this week simply watching. With Kiko, who now shares a pool with three other seals, she notices something striking: ‘Whenever I stand there alone for a while, they come back up to swim. But as soon as other people join, they dive back under.’ She tests it three times, with the same result. ‘Do they sense that I mean no harm? Or do they smell my hormones, maybe recognise my silhouette? The more often I come here, the more questions I leave with.’
Before walking away from Kiko, she pauses at the youngest seals in phase one. ‘They’re so small compared to Kiko and Addie,’ she writes. One of them has a wound on his flipper. ‘I’d want to pick him up, rock him in my arms, and whisper that everything will be alright.’
With Addie, whom she now also visits on Anja’s behalf, she notices something different. ‘He reminds me of an upbeat colleague of mine. Always cheerful, unmoved in times of stress.’ She watches him repeatedly climb onto the edge of the pool, lie there briefly, then slide back off, ‘as if he’s imagining his own little slide.’ When she later sees him touch snouts with the seal on the other side of the dividing wall, she wonders: ‘Would he miss Kiko after all? Can a solitary animal ever be lonely?’
At the end of her visit, soaked through on the way to her car, a feeling of loneliness comes over her. At home, she hugs her own dogs a little longer than usual. In an email to the group, she later describes how this stayed with her: ‘While I started out observing the seals, I notice the process is also making me observe myself. Questions about attachment, recognition, and loneliness seem to move back and forth between them and me.’
Anja, temporarily in Berlin and so at a distance from Addie, finds that this is where she writes the most. ‘My writing is most activated in absence,’ she notes. She’s been collecting colours and silhouettes: she bought six new inks, mostly green and blue, with silver for Addie’s belly. She’s working on line drawings inspired by Laura’s descriptions of Addie’s playfulness, and mentions that people back home keep asking about him: ‘They text me, call me, collect pictures – especially the kids are so curious how you’re doing.’
Meanwhile, Kiko’s approaching release is already on her mind too. ‘My thoughts also go out to Kiko and the idea of him being released,’ writes Anja from Berlin, sending Laura an advance farewell wave for when the moment comes.
