A Study in Drowning

I was a woman when it was convenient to blame me, and a girl when they wanted to use me.

We must discuss, then, the relationship between women and water. When men fall into the sea, they drown. When women meet the water, they transform. It becomes vital to ask: is this a metamorphosis, or a homecoming?

That was the cruelest irony: the more you did to save yourself, the less you became a person worth saving.

How terrible, to navigate the world without a story to comfort you.

I will love you to ruination.

There was an intimacy to all violence, she supposed. The better you knew someone, the more terribly you could hurt them.

I will love you to ruination,” the Fairy King said, brushing a strand of golden hair from my cheek. “Yours or mine?” I asked. The Fairy King did not answer.

But if fairies and monsters were real, so were the women who defeated them.

I wish I had fought.” Effy surprised herself by saying it. The words had leaped out of her throat, unbidden. “I know I beat him in the end, but for so many years all I could do was run and hide. I just sat there and let the water pour in around me. I didn’t know that I could fight back. I didn’t know how to do anything but wait to drown.” “Oh no, Effy. That’s not what I meant at all. You don’t have to take up a sword. Survival is bravery, too.

You don't have to take up a sword. Survival is bravery, too.

It began as all things did: a girl on the shore, terrified and desirous.

You're not just one thing. Survival is something you do not something you are. You're brave and brilliant. You're the most real, full person I've ever met.

Effy found herself half in love with the Fairy King sometimes, too. The tender belly of his cruelty made her heart flutter. There was an intimacy to all violence, she supposed. The better you knew someone, the more terribly you could hurt them.

It was an eternal feeling, this sense of being unwelcome. No matter where she was, Effy was always afraid she was not wanted.

Effy hated that she couldn’t tell right from wrong, safe from unsafe. Her fear had transfigured the entire world. Looking at anything was like trying to glimpse a reflection in a broken mirror, all of it warped and shattered and strange.

You don’t see yourself very clearly, Effy.” Preston shifted in his seat so that they were facing one another. “Challenging me isn’t pestering. I’m not always right. Sometimes I deserve to be challenged. And changing your mind isn’t foolish. It just means you’ve learned something new. Everyone changes their mind sometimes, as they should, or else they’re just, I don’t know, stubborn and ignorant. Moving water is healthy; stagnant water is sickly. Tainted.

Water finds its way through the smallest spaces and the narrowest cracks. Where the bone meets sinew, where the skin is split. It is treacherous and loving. You can die as easily of thirst as you can of drowning.

A romance is a belief in the impossible: that anything ends happily.

She was tired, tired of trying so hard for something she didn’t even want.

Anything can be taken from you, at any moment. Even the past isn't guaranteed. You can lose that too, slowly, like water eating away at stone.

If a story repeated itself so many times over, building itself up brick by brick, did it eventually become the truth? A house with no doors and no windows, offering no escape.

You don't have to love something in order to devote yourself to it.

Love is a fire that cannot burn alone

What is a mermaid but a woman half-drowned, What a selkie but an unwilling wife, What a tale but a sea-net, snatching up both From the gentle tumult of dark waves?

That was the truth at the very center of everything, the truth she had tried her whole life to evade: there were no fairies, no magic, and the world was just ordinary and cruel.

That things are only beautiful because they don't last- Full moons, flowers in bloom, you.

I will love you to ruination." "Whose ruination? Your's or mine?" You did not answer and I still wonder.

He had loved nothing more than the truth, and she had loved nothing more than her imagined world. Somehow, in spite of that, they had found each other.

In the end I learned that the water was in me. It was a ghost that could not be exorcised. But a guest, even uninvited, must be attended to. You make up a bed for them. You pour from your best bottle of wine. If you can learn to love that wich despises you, you can dance on the shore and play in the waves again, like you did when you were young. Before the ocean is friend or foe, it simply is. And so are you.

I wanted you, too. For so long. It was terrible. Sometimes I could barely eat- sorry, I know that sounds like the strangest thing. But for days I didn't feel hungry at all. I was... occupied. You took away all the other wanting from me.