submerged

She wore gauzy clothes that drifted with the wind, in pale shades of iris and indigo, lace dripping off the ends and dancing in the shadows of the creases. In the top drawer of her antique dresser she kept a tiny glass box filled with silver glitter, and she would throw it in the air and dance under it before she left her room. It was the magic that would weave a shell around her, weave a shell that would protect her from the real world.

To her, the real world was everything dark and dirty and scary. The vibrations of her parents shouting, the cold, empty feeling when somebody stopped holding her hand. It was the awkward stares that twisted people's insides, it was the crude jokes of class clowns.

The only place she felt safe was in the water. The ocean was her favorite place in the world, and she felt far more composed floating there than walking on land. When she was above the sand, above the shells, above all that was hard and concrete, she knew life would be okay. In the comfortable rush of the waves, she knew she was born a mermaid, cast ashore and given heavy weights for legs because of some unthinkable sins of a past life.

Please forgive me, she would cry to the sea, Please let me return.

But the ocean's angels only turned their scaled tails away, letting her tears fall in with the rest of the castaways.

You must live the life you've been given

they sung her, you must live the life you've been given.

And when she asked why, they whisper

Because we must, because we must.

We looked back, you see, we looked back.

We are only whole in the ocean, on land we are a pile of salt.