After everything, it is gentleness that will shatter you

It is not your first time walking on this here Earth. Though you are young, and the sun shines smooth on your fresh apple cheeks, you are keenly aware that you have been here before. You have had mixed parcels of luck left on your lap in your past lives, then you reincarnated into debt for the fortune you had accrued in each. In one, you were a god, an indifferent cloud watching the mountains crumble into lethal dust over villages. In another, you were a mermaid, beautiful and accused of merciless seduction.

Now, you are on a beach. Having lived as long as you have through the millenia, you do not recognise what beach it is, both because they all look so similar, but also because they look so different with each passing century.

In this life, you are a human being. In your mortality-induced sobriety, you remember what it’s like to be vulnerable to ordinary sensation. The last time you got washed up here, you were a mermaid diving into the warm summer water, sunlight splintering into white shards over every scale covering your lower body, gorgeous and modest.

Now it is cold. The breeze cuts against your skin and the sand feels like tiny tiny glass. The sand is glaring white with the sun. You sense the sun is one of your past-life enemies, perhaps one of the villagers who crumbled beneath your indifference now reincarnated to watch you squirm under its gaze. There are no walls or rocks around for you to hide from the wind or the light. You go to scratch your skin and see a scale flake off, dull and gunmetal blue.

You have a sense that in your previous life you did something wrong, but you don’t know what. You know you had loved someone, but you don’t know what happened to them.

It was a sailor. You saw the limp in its leg and thought, what an unusual thing; it looks like one of those humans, but it cannot be, it is misshapen. Its legs more like yours than like other human’s; dragging itself along the deck.

But it was — he was — a human. You had talked to him from afar, him leaning over the bough of his ship in the night, spotting you by your glistening tail. He told you what it was like to walk, reliving his happiest days in those stories, the difference between gravel and wood and fresh mud, so delighted by how easy it is to amuse you. You had worried about being captured by him, but then allowed him to ensare you.

And likewise you told him what the ocean is like, the vast body he can no longer swim in, which he had loved so much when he first became a sailor.

You described to him the vibrant oceanic colours he cannot see, grasping through a net of associations to cast a new language between you two. Purple, like a dream that feels more real than reality. Deep blue, like when I see my mother cry. Red, like the way that I furiously want everything I love most and cannot have. Although you spoke at a distance between the boat and the sea, you had privacy there, you each holding the other’s gaze taut like a rope. You were married by the moon, it hung over you like a mother.

Once, you confided in him how you lead legions ships onto the rocks with your song so that they would not raze through miles of coral. His face was horrified at the story that you thought was playful and offbeat. You fought, and then you make a promise that if you ever get a chance again, you will not do so much harm to the humans.

He loved you. Or he loved stories about the ocean; it’s hard to know. But it didn’t seem to matter.

Now, because you have not used your legs for a whole lifetime, your legs are weak and frail. You spend days dragging yourself across the sand, learning how to meet the most basic needs that a human being has. When your stomach twists, you learn that you need to eat; the best things to eat have warmth beating inside of them, and they wriggle and squirm out of your reach, which somehow makes it all the more satisfying. When the sky feels mysteriously heavy, you learn that you must lie in place until it fades black from the corners. And sometimes, when your chest tightens, you let out a choke that turns quickly tenses across your whole body and then releases, and your foggy thoughts become small, salty little dashes of rain. You rain, rain, rain until the sky darkens.

But you get stronger, because you have nothing else to do but drag yourself around until you become strong. You learn how to seize a fish in one strike with your bare hands. When lightning strikes, you learn of fire and warmth. When it rains, you learn to drink.

Then one day in the night, you see a cluster of moving things in the distance.

They are moving on the sand, upright and noisy.

They are human beings. The first you have seen. You talk to them and are surprised that you know their language, because you thought you had not spoken to anyone in this life.

The human are friendly, they laugh, they take pity on you and feed you. Even though you have been a crazed, barely alive thing, eating uncooked fish, they seem to see and think that you are a human being just like them.

They say they have landed their ship ashore to here a bad storm, and an orca had been hounding them to go this way.

Orca?

Yes, a killer whale.

It sounds like this — they imitate a sound between laughing and singing. Such a dangerous animal, and it sounds just so silly.

It is an annoying animal, the experienced explorers say, it circles the island again and again, never straying far from the coastline, making its ceaseless calls to god knows what.

The orca calls enter your dreams, plunging you into strange and deep places. One night, you have a nightmare. It goes like this: You were you, the old you, the beautiful you, thrashing about in an ocean turning red. You had dragged your sailor into the ocean with such fervour; or he had leapt in, you cannot remember exactly. Now you know, this is how you died: your mouth metallic, thrashing, bleeding from your tail from something that had been thrust at you from overboard.

But this time, the orca call is what wakes you. You realise you are still alive, and you are stirred by an ache in your legs, sharply aware of their existence. You run to go towards the sound, and you see the orca.

You recognise it immediately.

It circles the island again and again because of its bent fin.

An unusual animal, misshapen.

It is the sailor, from a past life.

You want to thank him, to apologise to him, but he is already gone, glinting in the distance. That’s when you look down and realise that you have been running, strong and hard and fast, your legs wild with pain. You are ready to be human.