[diary] a mermaid afraid of the ocean

In my dream, I am running with my two sisters into a cold sea. The sky is rainy, overcast, turning the surface of the water gray. We are mermaids with allegiance to both land and sea: on ground, we run on two legs; in the water, we swim with tails. At first, all the familiar feelings of happiness flood me at seeing water swirl around me. This is my home.

Then, Eunice screams—the floor has given way suddenly from seafloor to a sudden drop, and she is unprepared for the plunge. The barrier between myself and my sisters’ lives has always felt thin, and in dreams, it becomes fluid, until I slip from one perspective to another as easily as changing into a different set of clothes. For a moment, I am Eunice, and in her body, the ocean is no longer my home, no longer a place of mysterious beauty.

Instead, I experience her thalassophobia. For a second when the floor drops and I fall, my nose and eyes fill with a cold sharp onslaught of water. Oh God. The dappled light and teeming life of the epipelagic zone fades from sight, and all around me closes in a gray, final darkness. I can’t breathe. I had never looked straight into the deep mouth of the ocean before, and it is endless, and cruel, and deeply indifferent. It is death.

Then I feel my sisters seizing my arms and I burst through the surface, gasping for breath. I return to my body, but I am shaken. I have never been afraid of the ocean. Now I am.

In my dream, we climb out of the water of one accord, and walk quietly, sobered, along the shore, and as we walk, I come to the realization that we are lost. Lost in perhaps a deeper sense than geography: as in we have lost our family, we have lost our home, because what is a mermaid who cannot swim into the depths of the ocean without feeling afraid?

Long silver needles of rain clatter onto an abandoned town. All the buildings are dilapidated and breaking apart, but in the main square, an enormous trash can is filled to overflowing with empty soda cans and beer bottles. A mountain of colorful waste. Someone is still living here.

In the last house along the shore, we see lights. A crowd of men pour out, drinking and laughing. They hold ropes on their shoulders and their eyes are not kind. I veer away towards the cliffs at the edge of the path and look down. It is round red stones all the way down, and then the water, which from this distance looks hard as stone. Who was it who said that water was incompressible, meaning that a long fall from a great height would be like hitting concrete—that it could break bones, rupture our organs? Why had water, our natural element, suddenly become an enemy? I kicked a polished pebble down the cliff and watched it hit the water with a sharp splash.

Esther, my sisters call brightly, and I turn to see them laughing, walking toward me. They said they would give us a ride home in their car. Isn’t that nice?

Nice. I do not trust the kindness of men with cruel eyes. I look at them, the way their blunt fingers run over their ropes, and I whisper to my sisters, Did you tell them?

What?

Did you tell them we are mermaids?

Well, yes, they say, their eyes warm with trust, we did have to tell them where we came from.

I look up quickly. The men begin to draw near. Their mouths work into a strange smile. I grab my sisters’ hands and pull them towards the cliff. The men are getting closer. I scream, Jump!

Lydia hurls herself into the water first. Then Eunice and I. I hear her crying out, struggling to hold herself in the water. Then, to my horror, I watch a man dive in. He swims in broad, strong strokes, experienced and unafraid, and reaches Eunice first. He pulls her face out of the water by her hair; his hands meet at her throat. He gestures for the other men to cast their nets.

Look at this! he sneers, his face taking on an ugly gray pallor from the lightning-split sky, the rain-riddled sea. You ever seen a mermaid afraid of the water?

Instantly, Lydia and I swim toward him, flashing through the waves in one concentrated movement. Our bodies churn through the water, creating a whirlpool of liquid black walls around him.

Bold of you to think you could try to capture three mermaids in their own home, I say, my voice bright and cold. The anger of the sea is now on our side.

Water crashes over him and my sister both, and the pressure forces him headfirst into the darkness—but Eunice breaks free, and swims up from the murky pit, breaking through the glass surface of the water. I am Eunice, and she is me: we have learned how to swim.

But I wake up, and feel a chill I had never felt before at the memory of that darkness, the cold colorless depth without end, the eyes of the man flooding shut as he sinks into the water. The ocean is our home. But for the first time, I know what it feels like to be afraid of the ocean.