Chlorine

A classic trait of girlhood - forever confusing your desires with that of an older man's.

I guess hearts are slippery because they’re covered in blood. I wish I could bleed mine dry. Then I’d miss you less.

Nearly every human memory is corrupted by the fact that it is a memory of being human

Humans and monsters both understand stories about magic and marvel and myth are made interesting by their stemming from trauma and violence and blood. How can one grow without pain?

On the day of my first period, I was more dead doe than human woman. Was womanhood always so violent, raw?

My period continued, an inevitable cycle, yet every month I was somehow surprised by the violent pain. It was as if I refused to believe my body, something I’d trusted for years, would repeatedly betray me. My stomach ate itself from the inside, a revelry I had been dragged to, a feast I was forced to join though I was not hungry. The meal lasted four to six days, gorging on cramps, the spilled crumbs falling out of me stained with raspberry jam. My stomach was never a clean eater, gnawing on my uterus and fallopian tubes, leaving bite marks. I counted each rotation of the sun with heightening anxiety until it passed and I reset the clock. The knife carved my insides into pot roasts; the fork jabbed my sides into holey cheese. I could distinguish each fork prong—the pain was profound. My guts twisted around the spoon like spaghetti, tangled noodles slathered in scarlet marinara. Menstruation was more smashed acidic tomatoes than sweet fruit compote. I wiped my fingers on white jeans made of napkins and left streaks dried to rust. The stains came out with bleach and detergent. I died and regenerated every month. How else could I define the experience? The reasonable explanation was death. I decided when my body was wheeled into the morgue, the coroner would declare I died of being a woman. Which was far better than dying of being a man.

Humans are the downfall to myths. Whether the human razed the home, broke the heart, or betrayed the trust, the mythical is always in a worse state after the introduction.

Mermaids were beautiful, and was I not also beautiful? Alluring? A creature of the water? Not of salt like the mermaids in the book, but of chlorine.

I never said yes, but I never said no, and the indefinite limbo of maybe is where regret and doubt and confusion reside as neighbors, forever reduced to the monotony of a clouded memory, the mind traveling in never-ending cul-de-sac circles.

Beautiful things demand touch. Hence the taped floors at art museums and the roped boundaries between paparazzi and celebrities on red carpets.

Do you understand the world I lived in? How my mutilations were a gift?

Grudges are for humans too small for forgiveness.

They were both heavier than I remembered, as if their sadness had materialized into solid weights onto their shoulders, but it is true that what humans call intergenerational trauma has always been heavy, sinking to the gloomy abyss of repressed memory to be mined for so-called wisdom later. I was newly aware my parents were people who carried their burdens on their bodies rather than within themselves—this was my doomed inheritance.

I planned to land like a cross onto your bed where your body indent rested—back then, hell, even now, I would have been willing to die by crucifixion if you controlled the nail and hammer.

How was I supposed to differentiate between the pain due to the concussion and the pain due to the agony of everyday human life?

In a way, my breaking compounded my ascendancy, though it was never I who did the actual breaking. It was my head, the people, and the systems around me. As a human, I was weak. I allowed myself to crack. Today, as a mermaid, I am strong. Unbreakable. You cannot touch me,

How selfish I was. But I was meant to be selfish—my self, meeting the fish.

My heart screamed in capital letters.

I judged her days as remarkable for their mediocrity.

He was a winner who did not understand how to lose, the most dangerous kind.

What is it called when immigrants reverse, when they wake up from the nightmare masked as a dream?

As a mermaid, I now recognize how winning places the self within a construct of hierarchy over other bodies—a false construct. There’s no victory when someone else loses. But back then, oh, how I adored winning. The rush of it all! You poor humans. You’ll never learn to be better, not when winning is so addictive.

How awful it was to be constrained to the pubertal development of the female body.

I transformed because I became who I was meant to be all along.

it is true that what humans call intergenerational trauma has always been heavy, sinking to the gloomy abyss of repressed memory to be mined for so-called wisdom later.

My uterus sensed the upcoming meet was important, and so, like most needy children, it announced itself at the most inopportune of times.

She never came to my swim meets because she cared too much. My disappointment was hers if I swam badly, and my high was hers if I won,

Ravenous hunger, wanton sexuality, and the consequences thereof--how exhausting to be constrained by mortal biology.

Humans break so easily. They break their bones, their bodies, their hearts. I, too, as a girl, once broke. My head. And when this happened, I, like many other humans, did not allow myself the time and resources to fully rest, heal, recover. Of Course, there are excuses: No health insurance. Boss wants me back in the office tomorrow. You must pay for the ambulance. I'm out of sick days. No paid maternity leave. Need to get back to swim practice. There are, essentially, human excuses, but more specifically, American excuses. I'm confined to a comprehension of human difficulties through an American lens, no matter how hard I try to break out of the star-spangled brainwashing I was subject to from a young girl's age. In a way, the recognition that these issues are uniquely American makes it worse, because they are entirely avoidable.