Chlorine

by Jade Song

But let me be clear, so you cannot misconstrue my motives: while my journey may seem lonesome, I was never alone in my scars. I was the sole chlorine mermaid on my team, but I was not the only girl to self-mutilate. As proud athletes, it was expected our mutilations were a natural course of action to reach peak condition. Some cut. Some bulked. Some purged. It’s all the same. Together we girls molded our bodies and selves into what Coach Jim wanted. What we wanted.

The water was different. My home. And Jim was an adult who clearly saw something special in me. Under Jim’s watchful eye, my body would blossom.

I didn’t mind—I was a beautiful human girl. So beautiful I could understand why he wanted to touch me. Beautiful things demand touch. Hence the taped floor lines at art museums and the roped boundaries between paparazzi and celebrities on red carpets.

Though my father’s flight was not until eleven a.m., he insisted on arriving early, to offset potential security or visa issues. He had never managed to pick me up from practice or school on time, yet he was seven hours early for his own departure.

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

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.

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

He dug deeper, bringing a sharp pain, and I prepared myself for the afterlife, as I was sure I had just died a brutal, violent death, convinced he had broken through my cervix, my stomach, my skin, and the copper IUD was sticking out of my belly button like an impaled sword, but instead the doctor shouted in triumph and patted the lower half of my stomach in a misguided attempt at comfort. “It’s over!” he declared, snapping his gloves off. I was sobbing, and the doctor was bewildered at our opposing reactions, him joyous, me devastated.

Ravenous hunger, wanton sexuality, and the consequences thereof—how exhausting to be constrained by mortal biology.

You must know by now my mermaid tale is no such joyful narrative. And you would not be interested in this story if it were.

And it dawned on me one night, when the rubber-band marks were vivid across my skin and my eye bags were dark and haggard, that mermaids would never be disqualified for their legs coming apart, like I, a girl who couldn’t even keep her legs together for her best swimming event, had been. If mermaids, the most successful swimmers of all, owned single tails instead of two legs, then wouldn’t chlorine mermaids carry tails too? I frantically schemed how I could achieve this conquest. How I could become. I realized I would have to force my body to embrace pain, one of Jim’s favorite mantras. I thought of the sewing kit nestled in my mother’s desk drawer.

I was calm. Years of swimming had taught me to remain undisturbed in the face of great anticipation and adversity. My hands were steady. Pain would not come from sewing my legs together. Pain came from Jim’s 8x200 butterfly descend red punishment set. From disqualifications. From concussions. From losing. Pain came from remaining human.

Ren, I loved you when you were girl. I admit it, freely. And I love you now when you are mermaid.

I am my own mermaid, with my own tale. My own tail. Understand I loved my human parents. Understand they loved me. Everything we did for, and to, each other was out of love. Even our farewells.

My tail pulsed with fury when I landed on Jim’s at the bottom of the pile. I didn’t want to read his note. Every pen stroke of his, whether it was crossing the t’s or dotting the i’s, slashed my heart with both ferocious anger and wretched, unwanted affection for the diabolical man who had controlled so much of my human fate. He was always doing questionable things; by now, in the hospital, I interpreted his actions as wrong and inappropriate, but it was too late to stop him, and back then when he might have listened, I had been too young—and too human—to understand the harm the man’s thousand small cuts would do long-term to girls like me. Instead, I had laughed, conceded, even enjoyed. Wasn’t this cordiality what all the men wanted? A genial concession to their advances, to keep the door open for the possibility of their future creeping?

A proper education, a predictable curse, a classic trait of girlhood: to be forever confusing your desires with that of an older man’s. And the folklore book had shown me even most mermaids were not free of this—I would never forget those Chinese mermaids, stranded on sand or stolen for marriage, dependent on the goodwill whims of men. I swore to myself, as I ripped Jim’s card into shreds, that I would break the curse and write my own legend.

Who else could I depend on now, and who else could I have depended on in the past? The disappointment, the frustration, at not being known, fully, truly, by her, even now, with a tail so clear and magnificent, was enough to sever any last tie that kept me bound to her— Though not the strings I’d use to manipulate her. I resolved my will. I had achieved freedom from human bond.

As Cathy swam back and forth in the creek, I grieved, not for my girlhood or the swim team or the failed races, but for losing her, for losing the chances I could have had with her, and for my memories forever tainted—such was the price of transcendence beyond human.