I am looking at those scattered and armoured. Those breathing and drowning. Those cunning and beautiful. I am stuck between them, between my love for the visible and my fear for the invisible. I go down to the edge of the sea, until the very edge, until the waves melt the shore and the little worms eat up what's left of it. In a small rock pool lies a crab imprisoned. Far and far away from its clan. Around it there are hundreds of little worlds that whisper thousands of words. I do not want to miss any of it.

Suddenly another tiny crab gets brave until it is again swallowed by the incoming tide, until I can see its shiny green face. It leaves a wildfire foam behind. That reminds me, we never walk into the same rockpool twice. The sea was, as always, slamming its doors, shouting and hissing like a deranged feline. I caught sight of the hermit crab for only a moment as it hurried along the tide line. The shell on its back was weathered with lime deposits, a little eaten down by sea worms, and one of its brown forelimbs hung slightly lower than the other.

Like all hermit crabs, this one would eventually face the same curse. When the right time came, it would have to leave its one-of-a-kind shell behind and rummage through the seafloor like a manic gardener for a new one. It would repeat this every few years. As its body grows, it would find itself desiring what it does not have.

Of All Habitats

Above the sea, in the human world, we are not all that different. We find shells for ourselves too — shells like those of the hermit crab, neither fully ours nor fully not ours: shells offered by the sea, by death, by the tides; shells that connect the past to the future. Names, cities, professions, relationships, ideas, habits. We settle into them, grow warm inside them, and mistake them for home. Then one day we reach their limits. The inside becomes unbearable of all habitats.

All 800 species of hermit crab, without exception, eventually leave their shells. Some are caught by predators. Some are swept away. Some never find what they are looking for. But no hermit crab dies without trying. Humans, however, differ from their clawed relatives here. Humans endure, or worse, they get smaller and smaller.

Very few of us are blessed with the privilege of trial and error while searching for new shells, the way hermit crabs are. Very few of us are blessed with being able to crack our shells in two like that. And very few have the social infrastructure of care and reciprocity that hermit crabs have with one another when it comes to exchanging shells.

Perhaps that is why watching the hermit crab fills me with joy: its rush to go back into the water, how it blooms like a white flower every spring, with a new shell. You can hear the sound of its rebellion against the sea: this crackling sound comes from all around you. The sound of an old life cracking open, like an oyster. The sound of hermit crabs making a leap into a new life. A sound so cruel and so beautiful.

But I am not sorry for them, but rather happy, for I believe the waves break their hearts and shells every day — it breaks them open so that they are never closed again to the rest of the world. Through this breakage rockpools reach wider landscapes, you and me.