They are the small school that encourages me. I am the one that encourages them. Two lost salmon with moldy green heads and coral red bodies like mine. Three who got lost during a fight but still return home. Three misunderstood Sockeye Salmon displaced by a stream. From a distance, we watch them, but we never assist them.

Their will is immeasurable. They deliver jarring ripples throughout land and water. They courageously squirm upstream and downstream, letting water slick back their fins and scales with such vigor they take a wrong turn on their own route. This is how they swim.

Let one salmon start to drift too far from the school, they’d each sink like weights, each overlapping and carrying each other. Swim, swim, swim they chant when I slack. They support.

When I am too tired and too lost to keep swimming, when I am simply just a mear fish against an onslaught of sloshing streams, I view the salmon. When the streams are nothing but muggy. Three salmon who swam despite disorientation.  Three who trudge and keep trudging. Two whose star reason to be is me.