Chlorine

by Jade Song

I dreamt myths larger than my girl body could hold.

Are we bodies of water? Are we swimming in pools of blood?

Beautiful things demand touch.

These are, essentially, human excuses, but more specifically, American excuses. I’m confined to a comprehension of human difficulties through an American lens, no matter how hard I try to break out of the star-spangled brainwashing I was subject to from a young girl’s age. In a way, the recognition that these issues are uniquely American makes it worse, because they are entirely avoidable.

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.

It is the women, the genderqueers, the mermaids, who are hard. Worth the battle. After long romps and long conversations and long nights with them, I emerge sweaty, victorious, exhausted from the lock of our mental and physical wills, the connection between our grappling bodies and hardy memories.

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

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

These moments after practice, in the dark, alone, were sacred and divine. Though I believed in neither God nor organized religion nor Jesus, I imagined I was in church, experiencing my own sort of baptism. I’d pray to the Pool Gods and Poseidon as I reclined on the lane rope, my body half-submerged, inhaling the embrace of chlorine like it was the last drop of water left in the oasis before I died parched in the desert.

How dare I feel anything but salivation for glory?

I lacked the delusion: Star athletes had to be delusional enough to think they could withstand physics and gravity enough to fly up onto the first-place podium and shine with the sheer force of athletic ability; there was nothing more bold than a star, after all, visible with the human naked eye despite its death eons ago. To be a star there could never be any room for self-doubt, which was where people like you and Luke thrived, as you both were larger-than-life characters who kicked out any lingering whiffs of insecurity by the sheer volume of your egos;

If I entered the memory, I would not have the strength to exit.

When I was a human, my brain preferred to forget—a skill learned from swim practice, from strenuous races, from the teasing of my teammates, from Jim’s inflicted emotional scarring. I suppose deletion was my chosen method for putting myself through repeated torture. I had to forget how painful a 100 butterfly sprint could be, or else there was no way I would let myself do it again. But mermaids—mermaids relish pain. Mermaids embrace pain. Mermaids accept the pain of discipline is far less than the pain of regret.

They were both heavier than I remembered, as if their sadness had materialized into solid weights onto their shoulders, but it is true that what humans call intergenerational trauma has always been heavy, sinking to the gloomy abyss of repressed memory to be mined for so-called wisdom later. I was newly aware my parents were people who carried their burdens on their bodies rather than within themselves—this was my doomed inheritance.

Reliance was a feature of any close relationship, as were desires. A proper education, a predictable curse, a classic trait of girlhood: to be forever confusing your desires with that of an older man’s.

The brief euphoria of becoming a magical creature would never be enough to sustain me through a life reduced to woman.