Love Begins Where Fairy Tales End

When I was a mermaid and he was a handsome prince, I fell in love.

I fell in love with a man I barely knew. I fell in love because I was looking for freedom for just one night. I fell in love like I was looking for a way out of my life. I fell in love like a girl who thought she was a mermaid.

I was drowning in my own grief, but I thought I was breathing water.

I was drowning in the mucus inside my own infected lungs, but I called it normal.

My life was so full of water. I’ve always called myself a waterbaby, but what I meant was that all I’ve ever wanted was to get away. When you’re chronically ill, your body is your life sentence. When you’re chronically in pain, your body is a prison cell.

When your mind is so full of trauma you’ve built idols to the ghosts inside the overflowing attic of your own head, you wear a straitjacket only you can see.

I was crazy, and dying, and deserving of death as punishment for all of my imaginary crimes. So I was told by the people who claimed to love me most. So I came to believe.

When I was a mermaid and he was a handsome prince, we didn’t understand each other at all. I spoke like a girl and he spoke like a guy and never the twain shall meet. I didn’t know how to bridge the gap and he didn’t know there was one, or. I didn’t want to do all the work to bridge the gap and he thought my girl talk was just talking crazy.

I loved him but I did not know him. He didn’t want me to know him. He held himself away from me. When I came close, he raised his chin, stiffened his spine and spoke in a deep voice that belonged to someone else. I suppose he thought that’s what a real man should do. I suppose he thought that’s who I wanted him to be.

When he was a handsome prince and I was a mermaid, he refused to talk about his feelings. He claimed to have none. After only a short time, my insecurities and frustration took over. I gave up asking.

When I was a mermaid and he was a handsome prince, I spoke in riddles so that he would have an excuse to misunderstand me. I smiled like everything was fine and I tried to guess what he wanted me to want from him. I martyred myself becoming the person I thought he wanted me to be.

When he was a handsome prince and I was a mermaid, I didn’t think I was particularly worth knowing. I simpered and pretended to be someone else, more like the girls on the covers of magazines. I hid my soiled body and hoped he wouldn’t notice everything that was wrong with me.

I knew I would lose him. We all know how the real little mermaid tale ends. She doesn’t get the guy, but then, maybe she’s not really trying. Maybe she wants exactly what she gets in the end, which is the permission to die.

When I was a mermaid, I crawled away to die.

When he was a handsome prince, he walked away from me with head held high.

Maybe that’s all I ever wanted for him.

Maybe all he ever wanted from me was to let him go.

When I was a mermaid becoming a girl, I fell in love with the man beneath the mask. He came to me in scraps on the wind, songs told in the subconscious. I clung to the possibility of that person being real. I clung to how that person made me feel. I thought, maybe I would learn to dance someday, and then when we meet again I could be the beautiful princess and deserve him.

I tried to teach myself to walk again. I tried, but the story got it right. Every step really was agony.

Now I am a woman who is not a girl. I am not anything so fragile or forgettable as a girl. I am a woman who remembers being a mermaid.

Now that I am a woman, I cannot walk at all some days. Maybe there is too much damage done to my nervous system. Maybe I will heal someday. Today, though, my body is my body. Only my body. Exactly my body. Legs included.

Now that I am a woman, I am not a beautiful princess and I never will be. I cannot dance on these damaged legs as though they did not hurt at all. It would not be fair to these legs I’ve fought so hard to reclaim. It would not be fair to me to pretend to be something I may never be.

I am also not a mermaid. My lungs cannot breathe water. When my lungs fill with fluid and I cough until I throw up, that process is not purification for past crimes. It’s just another minor tragedy. I’m just another marginalized person fighting the mandates of history to breathe.

I am not a fairy tale creature. I’m just a boring everyday human being. I am also exactly a human being. I deserve to be loved, as much as anybody.

These are the kinds of lessons people always learn too late. Loving him is a lesson I’ve never not known.

Fairy tales make tragedy seem perfect. Real life is not perfect. Real life also does not have to be a tragedy. Real life can be better than any fantasy.

We decide with other people what real life is going to be, or not.

That’s where the magic lies.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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