Chlorine

by Jade Song

He gave me my first experience in attempting to prove myself to a man, with no avail.

I have already told you to forget what you know, but I know you will not, because you are human, and you are eternally trapped in your conventions.

Like many other stories, mine begins with a wretched man.

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

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.

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.

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

The home was a hard place to love, perhaps because it was the home, and you therefore expected so much more from it, and felt its failures more acutely.

Who declares what is feminine and what is not? Wasn’t strength a form of femininity?

Please understand what I did was out of aching loneliness—the only reason people ever do anything.

I am sure you would like to read about what happened next in the storage shed. Humans often forget their curiosity has malicious intentions. You want every detail so you can make appropriate judgments on the participants of such ambiguous events. You would like to decide whether I deserve your pity.

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?

A proper education, a predictable curse, a classic trait of girlhood: to be forever confusing your desires with that of an older man’s.

There were differences in what it meant to miss someone. I had grown up knowing this difference. I missed many people. My dad, my mom, my self I hadn’t yet met. And I missed them all differently. Missing someone out of love, missing someone out of loss—both an I miss you, I missed you too, but with disparate connotations. And like the unspoken implications in our friendship, Cathy and I had always carried our connotations differently.

Such was the reversal effect of sympathy, requiring the damaged to soothe the spectator.

“Because human lives are situational. Humans think they have free will, free agency, but really, they follow the push and pull of whatever happens. Take us, for example. We were pushed to swim, then we followed Jim’s instructions, which pulled us together. Pulled us close.”