Out of the Blue

by Jason June

Sitting up here in the lifeguard stand makes me feel in control, like I can direct the movie of my life and everyone in it.

My eyes zoom into a deep focus of his perfectly pink lips just in time for him to say the worst four words in existence: “We need to talk.”

Rom-coms fucking suck.

but it’s not like humans are transformed by our help. They just keep on crashing oil tankers and catching dolphins in their tuna nets and destroying coral reefs,

I’ve become a total rom-com cliché and there’s nothing I can do to stop

what’s that word again? Oh, street.

🤣

It’s worse than the incessant chatter of Pacifican dolphins. They will not. Shut. Up.

Elder Crab warned us about this, about humans’ obsession with gender and how labels and rules mean so much to them when it comes to the body.

Under the sea, we’re mer, we’re all they/them, and we don’t have this strange obsession with sex organs since we don’t have any.

This is weird. Not entirely unpleasant. But not a bay full of ...

Humans can be such blowholes.

How would a human feel if they had to watch their favorite pet get fried up and smothered in guacamole?

We always eat cold, mushy seaweed. Unless it’s out of season; then it’s cold, tough seaweed.

Labels everywhere, and it all seems to be wrapped around genitals.

it’s better to stick with the shark you know than the one you don’t.

They are most definitely, without a doubt, hypnothighzed.”

they’ve stopped staring at a mockup of prehistoric bones so they can think about seeing your historic bone, if you know what I mean.

It’s actually kind of cute. Gross.

They’re sort of like manatees, but humans literally squeeze their teats to make milk shoot out! Land is weird.

Instead of open waters with a whale buddy, students here are imprisoned inside a building, learning Blue knows what instead of connecting with the world around them.

Sure, there were a lot of people around when I went to grab coffee, but people were so focused on themselves. No one made eye contact, most had their heads in their phones, and any conversation they had was through tiny headphones poking out of their ears. Nobody had person-to-person interaction, and it bummed me out. Mer are constantly interacting, face-to-face, fin-to-fin.

People always thinks tops don’t have feelings, the “tough guys” in the gay world, but I can have my heart broken too.

The sight of all that paper used for just one person to read a book sent my stomach into a tsunami.

Sean’s eyes are gentle, and he’s close enough that I can see the rich browns and ambers and golds swirling there, his own kind of sunset. Oh, flick! Did I just think something as sappy as “his own kind of sunset”?

This is probably going to be the moment when he tells me he’s just as murderous and destructive as any other human. That he goes fishing on the weekends and hangs up sharks and halibut and stingrays on a hook to suffocate and die.

Reality shows are a slap in the face to the art form that is scripted storytelling.

I used to think this too… then we went into quarantine

Sure, the Scorseses and the DuVernays of the world make great work, but what’s better than watching something that makes you want to fall in love and laugh all at the same time?

Rom-coms are God’s work.

Yes, they’re real. Dragons, elves, sprites, trolls, you name it.”

“But what about Santa?” “He’s real all right,” Ross says, not a hint of joking in their expression. “But he stopped delivering presents to humans decades ago.

But nobody says IRL . . . IRL.”

I do IRL

Maybe humans aren’t as magicless as I thought. There’s definitely some kind of power in movies.

I might not be a jellyfish, but I have been acting kind of spineless.

if you turn my Journey into some lame movie when I’m gone, I’m going to crawl out of the ocean and drown you.”

“Tee-hee, hard-on,”

storks don’t deliver mer babies. That’s ridiculous. They deliver elf babies.”

Hey! Do you think that’s spelled S-E-A-M-E-N? Because mer live in the sea?

The worst movies are ones where the director can’t stick to a solid vision.

Actors say this can happen, that they get so into a role they forget what’s real and what isn’t.

There’s literal, my-mom-is-a-merperson type magic, and then there’s magic that we can create. Magic through forgiving someone, through letting them see how they’ve messed up and make it better and come back stronger together because of that.

I’m upset on behalf of the whales that had to be tagged to begin with: if it wasn’t for oil rigs and shipping liners, whale migratory paths wouldn’t be affected.

Some shot list isn’t this magical spell that makes things work out exactly how you want.

This is why you should never underestimate a person who you think is all jokes. Because sometimes, when the jokes are over, there’s some pretty profound stuff there.