I would say a person and a place are indivisible, though I am not a person, as such. I am not a person, for instance, like you, who has a liver and lungs and many complicated internal arrangements. While I am not exactly a single cell I am nevertheless, simple, and that is what I need to explain; my home is different to yours and without it, I die. And though you keep me here in this glass jar on the window-sill of your own personal habitat, and show me to others of your species, pointing and exclaiming about how you found me, still, if I shrivel and extinguish you would merely shrug. And despite your conversations – yes I’ve heard them – about the possibility of research and ‘grants’, if I did die, you would neither understand why or, worse, know how to enquire; the parameters of what is so essential to me being so hard for you, or your kind, to grasp. Your own species, for instance, seems able to move around, crossing vast areas of land and sea without either pain or personal damage. That to me is remarkable. And I see that you have, in a homogeneous sense, cleansed “difference” from your world in order, I suppose, to render it safe. You do not seem to spring, as it were, from a special place which is for ever part of you, but to have become sealed, as a species, from your origins. Yes, that is the right word I think, “sealed” from where you live.

That is the opposite of me! My own home is entirely specific. Home is me and I am it. We are essence.

That is what I need to try to explain, in the hope – please listen dear captor! – you might return me..

You know the place; your visit that day in early spring when the air was soft with possibility; you know the gentle proclivity of low lying rocks stretching out from the craggy shore into the open sea and how you marvelled at the quality of light where the sky meets the abundant water (for what else is the sea if not abundant?), glittering and full of information. That is the place; the corner in the far north-west; I think you call it (advisedly) the Isle of Skye. For such it is. Even talking about it, now, to you, brings life back into me. You thought to put some of the sea-water in the jar with strands of weed, which have now sunk morosely and lost colour, assuming I might need the comfort of my own habitat. How right you were! But you could not bring the light or movement. You could not bring the energy which is me only when I am there and dancing on the water, even in wild Atlantic storms.

For I am visible only when in motion. I am that glimmer, that dot of glancing light which hops and twinkles on the surface of the ever-moving water, in that particular place. I am the bright electric energy which seemed to you a manifestation of some tiny human magical shape.

And under those conditions when the sea and sky are full of radiant imminence I know that is how we can appear; as if we are fairies. That is the name you give us. But we are no more than a joyful clash of conditions; of air and water and light. Dancing. In that place.