The Deep

by Rivers Solomon

She had no wish to transform trauma to performance, to parade what she’d come to think of as her own tragedies for entertainment.

It was one of the few tangible things she’d touched of the past, a reminder that the History was not an imagining, not just stored electrical pulses. They were people who’d lived. Who’d breathed and wept and loved and lost.

Who might she have been had she not spent the better part of her life in the minds of others?

The History of the wajinru included triumph and defeat, togetherness and solitude.

This was how her people must have felt after the Remembrance. The raw pain of the memories was gone, but the truth of it still remained in the wajinru, helping them to carry on.

A people needed a history. To be without one was death. This was a feeling they knew all too well when the Remembrance drew near. It was an ache for knowing, and Yetu had had it once too.

She’d always done what she’d needed to do in service of her people, no matter the cost to herself. To preserve her own life, she’d fled, but now they needed her again, and there she was, willing to sacrifice herself for their benefit.

She didn’t grow gills or fins, but like Yetu, she could breathe both on land and in the sea. She was a completely new thing.