Chlorine

by Jade Song

They sold you false love disguised in pastels.

I reread the pages of the Passamaquoddy tale as my nightly bedtime story, wondering if I’d meet a girl friend someday, and if we’d intertwine into water-snakes. Where was she sleeping each night, without me? And where would we sleep each night, together, after transcendence?

Inwardly, I sought the weightlessness of water, to be as liberated as the aquatic beings in my imagination.

capitulated

Back then, I was a girl, a body of water, a liminal state of being, a hybrid on the cusp of evolution. Now, I am Ren Yu. I am 人鱼. I am person fish. I am mermaid. And so goes my tale of becoming. Are you ready?

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.

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

Cathy was the kind of blue-eyed white girl reminding me of the Blue Eyes White Dragon YuGiOh card I coveted when I was younger. And like blue eyes and whiteness, eventually I learned the Blue Eyes White Dragon was simply a construct too. A piece of flimsy card stock, its value ascribed by a mysterious higher power. I could go online and buy a million Blue Eyes White Dragon cards, and similarly, I could walk down the street of our suburb and see blue-eyed white girls everywhere, available a dime a dozen.

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

As I write, I feel the same fire from that streamline perimeter walk, relighting itself inside me, licking, inside my core, a slow smolder, a wholly different sensation from the numbing conflagration brought by streamline and the irritation of chlorine on skin—the feeling you give me is more like embers. Glowing.

I used to sneak squirts of your shampoo at travel meets instead of my own. When I emerged from the shower, it was like a cloud of you around my head.

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.

Let me go, Cathy. Let me go, Cathy. Cathy, Cathy, Cathy . . . My name. Nobody has ever said my name the way you do. A breathy exhalation after the hard C, a tongue dragging across teeth for thee. Every time someone calls my name, a fist clenches over my heart, yearning to hear it from your mouth instead.

And I hated what swimming did to you. I want you to know I hated it all. I hate it all. My hatred is as dark as the murky depths of the deepest oceanic trenches. Maybe this is why we are destined to never be together. Because I hate swimming, and you love it. Depend on it. Thrive on it.

I am alone. A-lone. A-, a prefix meaning “without.” I am without you. I miss you.