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My Albatross:
It’s been three years since I gave you that name, but I don’t think that I ever told you the story behind it.
There’s this old poem, about a sailor who shoots down an albatross after it leads his ship out of a storm. They end up stuck in a Calm Belt, and the crew all blames his thanklessness for their misfortune, so they force him to wear the albatross’s corpse around his neck as a sign of his guilt. They drift that way for weeks until they run out of water and the entire crew dies one by one–except for that sailor. The albatross keeps him alive until he makes it back home. It disappears then, but the sailor can never never die or forget its weight, so he just wanders the earth telling his story to everyone he meets.
That’s what you were to me. A curse.
It never seemed right that I should feel so much for someone I could barely remember. You weren’t even a person, really. Just an impression. Freckles under green sunlight, or the sense that someone is following just behind me when I’m running from the cops, or a voice telling me to come home every time I smell smoke.
Maybe if I were a better person, I would’ve learned to appreciate your presence, but as it was, you were just a reminder of what I used to have.
I didn’t even have memories of you to hold on to, Albatross.
And that’s the thing about loving someone, isn’t it? Once you know a person like that, you can never let them go. Not really. They just keep on haunting you, even after the memories fade. I’ll be taking you to the grave with me, probably, and it seems like a pretty sick irony that if I ever want to see you again, I have to go my whole life missing you.
I had to have known that, deep down, there was a reason for my remembering you. Not as much as I’d like to, not directly, but at least in a sideways kind of way, in attachments to little things: tree houses and bears’ teeth and seabirds on the horizon.
You’re not a curse. You couldn’t be, not when I was holding on to you with everything I had left. And yet I kept telling myself I needed you gone and that’s all these letters were: telling my story as a desperate attempt to have all that grief and guilt excised from my chest.
Albatross .
It feels like too cruel of a nickname for you, looking back.
But have you ever noticed how when something spends a lot of time on your mind, it starts to pop up everywhere you look? It’s called frequency bias. It’s not that there’s more of the thing, or that people are talking about it more, or whatever. We just notice it more. Because there’s some subconscious part of our mind that’s looking for it.
People have a lot of stories about you, Albatross.
One of my favorites is about a boy and his father. They inventors, and they’re being held prisoner building war machines for a cruel noble. One day an albatross plummets out of the sky into their yard, and they use its feathers and candle wax to make themselves wings to fly away on.
I won’t tell you how that one ends. I think it’s a better story that way.
There’s this island in the South Blue, too, where they believe that seabirds are the ghosts of sailors who died at sea. They turn into birds so they can return home and see the faces of their loved ones again before they fly to heaven.
They treat the birds there well. Feed them bread crumbs, let them nest in their rafters, the whole nine yards. Because they find it comforting, I guess. I just found it unnerving. It’s such a one-sided way of seeking closure that it feels naive. Why would you want your last memory of someone you love to be from a face they can't even recognize?
Maybe my reaction would have been different, if it had been you.
I knew you better in dreams than life, anyway.
Remember the one I told you about years ago? You were a giant gull and I was perched on your back and we were skimming over the surface of the open sea. Sometimes you would tip the plumes of your wings into the water just to scare me a little but it didn’t work, not really, because as long as I feel your presence I can only ever feel safe.
I don’t believe in fate but I do think that we were meant to be together. Nothing else feels right.
The doctors have always told me that the holes were just my memory trying to protect me and I would remember you when my mind and body felt safe enough to handle it. Pretty stupid, huh? Now I have you again for the first time since we were kids and I don’t think there’s a single safe place left in this whole world.
Three years since I named you. Three days since I read about you in the newspaper.
Feeling safe–what a load of bullshit. As if fortune ever gave that much of a shit about us.
Albatross… Ace. Whatever I’m supposed to call you. Your true name still feels a little foreign to me, but I guess I should get used to it since I’m going to be hearing it a lot more often now. Frequency bias, and all that.
Ace.
You really made a mess of things, didn’t you? We’re going to be busy picking up the pieces after Marineford, but that’s alright. It’ll keep my mind off the worst of it. I’m taking today off, though. There’s a lot of work to do and I keep telling them I’m all better now but Dragon says I need the time for mourning and he’s probably right.
I don’t know how to tell you this, Ace. This is the last letter I’ll be writing to you. Seems a little silly, now that I know who you are and all. You would hate knowing that you made someone feel so sappy.
Besides, even if you can read these letters up there in heaven, I’ll bet you’ve got more interesting things to do.
So once I’m finished with this I’m taking it and all the other letters I’ve written to you. I’m going to bundle them up and I’m going to take a little dinghy out to sea. It’s not much but it’ll get me far enough from Baltigo to pretend I’m back in the East Blue and then I’m going to burn them.
Feels poetic, doesn’t it? Not that you would care, you’d probably just call me a sissy or something. But at the heart of it all it was fire that kept us apart, and now they’re all saying you ate that Devil Fruit. There’s some sentimental part of me that thinks maybe if I’m able to bookend our parting this way, I’ll be able to move forward more easily.
I know that’s not how it works. It’s not like anything’s going to change now that I have more of you to hold onto. But that’s okay. People do silly things and believe in silly things all the time and I think I’m starting to understand why.
My only wish is that I could do this on Dawn Island. It’s honestly kind of funny. For a long time I hated that place and what it did to me, but now I remember you and Luffy and the best year of our lives and I can only bring myself to think fondly of it because no matter how awful the Goa Kingdom was, it gave me you.
That cliffside where we used to stand and talk about our futures would be perfect, but I’ll have to make do with what I have now. If you really can hear me from heaven on a plume of smoke, I’d like to think that it doesn’t matter how many miles lie between here and the place where I left you. We’re still brothers, aren’t we? If our bond isn’t strong enough to withstand a bit of open sea then we were probably never cut out to be pirates after all.
But I’m stalling now.
Thank you, Ace, for taking care of Luffy while I was gone. I’m not so used to being a big brother anymore but I promise I’ll do the best I can.
Until I see you again,
Sabo.