To Keiko

How do I express myself, the way I feel, in words? To me, it seems near impossible, although I am often known as an accomplished writer. It’s so hard to explain what your life Keiko, meant to the many people around the world.

What it meant to mine.

A real twist of irony to my claims was that on my seventh birthday, I was taken to see the movie, ‘Free Willy,’ your claim to fame. I disliked the movie back then, for a stupid reason that I wanted to see another movie instead. It wasn’t until 1994, after I visited an aquarium with huge animatronics orca, that I found such a passion in orca, and started to follow your journey upon watching the movie again, with an article in the news found afterwards on you.

My passion for you grew, and I loved to pick up the newspaper and cut out anything on you, as I recorded footage from the television. I watched with vivid interest as your life changed, and as those changes changed me. I never felt so alive and happy, as when I drew pictures, hoarded newspaper cuttings, wrote school projects on you, and watched the movies and television series of Free Willy, knowing that all the while, you were on your way back home.

I remember a school project in my eighth year of school. It had to be a focus study on a famous celebrity, and every boy was off doing some major action movie star, or super model, while the girls focused on cute guys. I did mine on you, going full out and making the project the best in the class. My project was passed around the school, for its originality, knowledge and overall passion towards you. I hold that project close, even to this day, the sole survivor of my vast collection.

I would dream often, of becoming a marine biologist and working somehow with you, as my youthful mind would crave to see you with my own eyes, and to hear you and feel your presence. I wanted nothing more badly, than to visit the Oregon Coast Aquarium, or your pen in Iceland, if only to catch the slightest of glimpses of you, the one creature that forever changed the world.

Changed me.

The day I discovered you were gone, it was the same day of my final exams at school, of my final year. It was the English exam, and the essay topics included one topic on, “Describe an event that has forever changed your life.” I left that exam near tears, from the essay that I wrote about how you'd changed my life.

I was lost. For almost an entire decade, following you was part my life. Now, you were gone and I felt extremely confused, as it seemed as if this part of me died along with you. I felt sorrow, anger, bitterness and loss, a kaleidoscope of emotions and feelings that caused me unwittingly to accept a singular, false truth.

That you had failed. That we had failed you.

I attempted to drive you from my mind, destroying my collection of clippings, taping over the footage and removing anything that reminded me of you. For an entire year, I tried to forget, pretend you had never existed…

But I was living a lie. I may have never seen you with my own two eyes, but the very sense of your presence on this earth caused me to change. You helped to shape the person I am today, and I was attempting to live as someone else.

When the time came, and it neared your anniversary, that’s when the pain and hurt surfaced, from bottling and hiding my true emotions, and trying to forget something, someone, who had forever changed my life. I realized the truth that I didn’t want to forget you, and that I never could if I even wanted. It was a mistake on my behalf to even try, for one can never forget someone like you, who captured the imagination of the world, and forever captured my heart and soul.

A line in a song, ‘I’ll Be There,’ sung by Escape Club claims, ‘I may have died, but have gone nowhere’. To you, this message is true. No longer are you to grace our world with your song, or your body, but forever will your memory, your spirit, and your legend always live on.

You’ll always be alive in our hearts.

Thank you Keiko, for everything that you have changed in the world, the people who have been involved with you, and in my life. Thank you…

Lee Harrison

 

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