Just Breathe
The gills aren't the experiment. Wanting to keep them is.
The hardest part, when the water fills your mouth and nose and lungs, is not to struggle.
They tell you this at orientation — as if the ocean requires a training program, as if wanting has nothing to do with it. If you struggle, they say, you could choke and die. They say this with straight faces, to a room full of volunteers, and nobody laughs.
Well, I laughed; they made a note.
I start my mantra before my feet leave the deck. The ocean is the cradle of life. I let it run underneath everything else, a current below the current. I’ve been saying it so long I sometimes catch myself thinking it in the shower, the car, half-asleep at two in the morning with salt on my tongue and no sea for miles.
They always shove you into the water in the moment before you remember to brace. The theory is that unseen waves cause less panic. The theory is that anticipation is the enemy.
I have never panicked.
I fall into the ocean’s embrace — that’s the only word, embrace, though I know how it sounds — and watch my own air rise away from me in silver threads. Those bubbles were inside my body three seconds ago. Now they belong to the surface world, climbing back toward a place I no longer need.
The gill-slits open behind my ears. It tickles, the way it always tickles, and I feel the movement pass down my neck like a shiver that knows exactly where it’s going. Four pairs in all, working in sequence, reading the pressure and the depth. The larger ones along my ribs catch the first real current and the rapture lifts — that honeyed confusion of low oxygen and weightlessness and blue — and I am simply myself again. Myself, but more.
It’s experimental, still. Technically. The program says so, and I sign the forms every ninety days. T-cell activation. Gene expression. Amphibious physiological modification. The language tries to make it smaller than it is.
I’ve been fascinated by mermaids since before I had the words for what I was looking for. I thought the gills would be apparatus — something attached, something removable. Something I could take off. But there is no taking this off. There was never going to be any taking this off.
I move through the indigo dark and I am not afraid of a single thing.
The watch vibrates at my wrist. Fifteen minutes. I’m expected back at the surface, back on the boat, back in the taxonomy of things that breathe air and stand upright and answer to their names.
I begin the ascent.
Next time, I’ll leave the watch on the boat.
This one’s from the vaults - originally posted at MissMeliss.com on 3 October 2017. You can listen to the audio version at BathtubMermaid.com.