peppermintfables

I: On the Shore, At night

The sea used to be your lover and garden, your hearth and home; no longer, not for a long time

It was a cumulation of things. Even if you love your home at some point everyone feels the desire to leave. To see new things. Look beyond that horizon of earth and stone and sand under the sun. The knowledge that you could leave is always there, for an selkie. Very few actually leave and of those even fewer come back in the end. Their stories are used to warn you, to help you resist whatever pulls you out of the ocean. Most of them are about love that betrays you. You don’t think you would ever leave for love. How is getting stuck on the ground with someone you love any better than being stuck in the ocean with those you love there. Who could ever make you choose that?

But when the time for a decision comes, when you see the child on the shore, freezing in the cold, that’s not really what matters. What matters is this: The child is suffering. What matters is: You want to leave. Together that’s enough to tip the scales.

Standing before it now, feeling the damp crumble of the sea beneath your feet, something inside you keens with terrible longing

Your coat hangs around you and the child is staring at you and you ignore the foreign heaviness in your bones to pick up the child and wrap the both of you in the coat together. Everything is pushing you down, your movements both unbearably slow and fighting against something that’s not there anymore and you adjust your stance. It feels good to stand, like for the first time you get to decide on a direction. Like for the first time you’ve already decided. You turn your back to the sea that has carried you all your life and start walking.

In your hands you cradle something

You can feel your skin under your fingers, where you are gripping it tight around the both of you. You’re not sure if that’s what’s keeping you warm or the way you and the child are pressed together. It doesn’t feel like you should be able to warm anyone. You are both so cold. But what use is it to differentiate between yourself and your skin anyway.

It’s time. You have to release it.

You don’t go back to the beach for years. You feel the longing for the familiar waves as you were always told you would and you’re afraid of it. Instead you built. A house, a garden, a family. You learn to walk and talk and sing. It’s just you and your child, that you’re raising, in your house at the outskirts of town but it’s enough to make you stay. It’s the kind of love that made you wonder how you could ever doubt how much this would matter.

You don’t go back to the beach for years but you do go back. Some part of you will always belong to the sea. You look at the coat in your hands, the part that warmed you and your family in that first night and in many after that. Your way back to the soft embrace of the sweeping waters. The first decision you ever made, A decision you’re still making . You throw your skin into the sea. Let it have that part of you.