Deep in the wide blue ocean swam a young whale named Lumi, who sang a song unlike any other. Most whales sang low, rumbling notes that carried for miles. But Lumi's song was high and strange and beautiful — so high that no other whale seemed able to hear it. Night after night she sang into the dark water, and night after night, no one ever sang back.
"Is anyone there?" her song seemed to ask. But the only answer was the hush of the deep sea, and the slow drift of the cold currents.
Lumi swam a long, long way, looking for someone who could hear her. She sang to the great gray whales near the icebergs, but they did not turn their heads. She sang to the humpbacks in the warm green bays, but they only sang their own low songs and swam on. Everywhere she went, her high sweet voice floated out and faded away, unanswered.
Lumi began to think she would be alone forever, the only one of her kind in all the endless sea.
One quiet evening, far from anywhere, Lumi sang her song into the dusk — and stopped, and listened, as she always did. But this time, faint and far away, something sang back. It was high. It was strange. It was beautiful. It was a song exactly like her own.
Lumi's heart leapt. She sang again, louder, and again the answer came, a little closer now. Through the long night she followed it, calling and listening, calling and listening, swimming toward the only voice that had ever understood her.
At dawn, in the pale gold light just under the surface, she found him — another young whale who sang the very same rare and lovely song. He had been searching too, all his life, for someone who could hear him. The two whales circled each other, singing back and forth, their high sweet voices weaving together into something neither had ever made alone: a duet.
"I thought I was the only one," said Lumi. "So did I," he said. "But here you are."
From that day on, Lumi never sang alone again. She and her friend swam the wide oceans side by side, and their strange high song — once so lonely — now rang out together, twice as strong and twice as sweet. And sometimes, in the deep blue quiet, young whales who felt different and alone would hear that song in the distance, and take heart, and know that somewhere out there, someone was singing just for them.
"No voice is too strange to be answered," Lumi would sing. "You only have to keep singing until it is."
And the ocean was never quite so lonely a place again.