Mermaids are the still corpses of stupid little girls, hanging white and indistinct in the water. Merciful fantasies of fish tails and Atlantis might exist, but only in the drowning children that subsist along the jagged edges of the sea break, broken, blood like fins around them. Existing in the moment right before the oxygen deprivation turns the lights off.
The song Katie claimed to hear, as we lay prone upon the beach, I learned, could only be heard by the stupid, the desperate, and the dying. For years she claimed mermaids lived on the rocks, half a mile out. If you found them they granted wishes. Perhaps all the wishes human have boil down to ‘I want to die on my own terms.’ In her moment of grief, when her world was shattering down upon her, Katie thought it was better to drown the body than the soul. All this she told me after, on the sandy shore that offered little comfort.
I owe you nothing. I never asked you to help me.
The memory is still very real. Heavy. It comes to me when I am lonely and afraid. The taste of salt. The sand against my feet as I pushed off from land into the galaxy of dark matter. Gravity twisted into current, monsters under my feet.
Why do you even remember that? I never asked you to talk to me. Stop talking to me.
My spot in time is the ocean; it’s terrible, wicked depths. It is the day Katie almost drowned. The day Katie tried to die, the day I took her wish away.
Most profound is the memory of the numbing water. My jean shorts heavy and wet on my hips. I am thirty yards, a mile, a thousand years out from the sunburned edge of the shore. Katie disappears into the black depth of the ocean, only to bob back up at the last second. Beneath me the ocean is a black hole, a look into the nadir of hell.
I want to stop. I scream for Katie but the salt spray chokes me. I try to swim faster, but I am cold. I am a child. I don’t want to die. In that moment I contemplate, for a protracted second, in selfish horror, of turning back. Of letting someone else deal with saving Katie. Letting them deal with the terrible fear.
Despite being a good swimmer, despite being stronger than her, I wanted to leave Katie to the sea because it was deep and cold and starving. I panicked. I was petrified. The waves were mountains. It would be so easy to let them take me back to shore, so easy to let Katie claim her mermaids.
But I didn’t. Somehow, among that fear, I moved. I caught her and dragged her back with me. I remember only the sensation of her skin, like butter, as if I could pull it from her bones it was so soft.
Even returning to the beach and the argument that followed remain distant, fuzzy images. But that moment in the water, that moment in which fear and bravery were a fine line, a distinct entity, I have cultivated. I have cherished. I have warmed with the realization that I survived. When I am feeling lost, or giving up, this moment returns to me. I loved Katie, I wanted Katie to live. It was that simple. I didn’t turn back. I didn’t let the ocean swallow her whole. This is what gives me strength, that fear is not what holds me back, but often gives me the strength to carry on.
Why are you telling me this? I don’t want to go. I am not the same girl I used to be.
I understand this. I understand it very well. I am sorry if you don’t understand. Maybe you do. Maybe you should.
Please…
I can’t. I am so sorry. I just can’t.
I missed you. Please, we can just talk it out.
No, you never missed me. You never did. Or you would have come with me…
I let her sleep. I had another story to tell her when she woke up.
She woke up with the sun. Or maybe it was the metal cup banging against the wire cage. She looked so different from the Katie I used to know. Not the same. But still the same. The whites around her eyes. Katie had green eyes. This Katie had brown. The mermaids had their own way of changing people. I know I had been changed.
What…?
"Have I told you about the Changeling?"
No.
Of course not. I knew this. I knew she would not know. She had been in and out of the waters for days, sleeping longer and longer.
She reminded me of—
I want to go home.
Soon enough, I promise.
Katie had changed. Their spell made her stronger than me, in ways I could not accept. She wanted to escape into the mountains. She no longer needed the water. But the feel of her buttery skin, her soiled hair, it made me obsessed with the way her face looked right before she went under. Her lips against mine, rough, salty, before she turned on her side and vomited.
Then she blamed me. She blamed me for driving her into the water like the last fucking unicorn. She told me that it was too much. She could not keep speaking to me. I saved her life, I saved her. We were the heroes of our own destiny and she made me feel like I was… weak. I was too weak to keep up with her spiral.
How…?
The question was never how. It was always why. Why did she leave? What had I done? Then I understood. She had gone under. She had swallowed the punch, in a sense. She was no longer the same girl I loved. The Mermaids had taken her. Just as the darkness takes the colors and the ocean rusts the knife. Katie had gone. Katie was not human anymore. Katie had been replaced with a monster.
I knew then what I had to do.
Katie was so easily captured. It took two years to regain her trust. I could see the mermaids at work inside her pretty eyes. She had grown her hair long and began to spend her time out in the sun. She was brown like the edge of the ocean and it bothered me. I missed her foam pale skin and her thick black hair.
She was blonde now. She was broken into bread and swallowed up by the hungry ducks. She was wrong. She was not my Katie. I had to find her. I had to.
I needed to figure out who she was. I needed to peel her like an onion.
—
Credits to: EternalGirl
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