i wrote this short story when i was 11 [into the blue]

The girl had a bit of an unusual childhood. Instead of being raised by her parents, like any other girl her age, she was raised by the sea. She knew the language of the waves like the back of her own hand. She loved the ocean in a way no one thought possible, and the ocean loved her back even more so. It transformed her in a way that caused people to no longer call her a girl, but instead, a mermaid.

As she grew older, the mermaid began expecting a merman to come and sweep her off her feet like they did in storybooks. A handsome merman, who would fall for her as quickly and as effortlessly as a wave crashing onto the shore. They would love each other with a passion no one thought possible, and transform each other in a way she had never dreamt of even in her wildest dreams.

So, the mermaid waited. She believed in this merman fiercely and passionately, for what else was there to believe in besides the power of love? The mermaid believed and waited and waited and believed for several lifetimes – for the ocean had made her immortal – until finally, one day, she recognized the fact that maybe there wasn’t a merman in the first place.

The mermaid got sucked into a dark hole. A dark hole from which she felt she would never be able to escape. For the mermaid had spent so much time hoping and dreaming and fantasizing about the future, about her merman and their spectacular love affair, that she now had completely forgotten how to focus on and treasure the beauty of the present. Both the present and the future were as good as dead to the mermaid, and this nearly destroyed her.

She stopped visiting the ocean. What was the point, when there was no handsome merman there to come and sweep her off her feet? She lived her life quietly and peacefully from the safety of the shore. Comfort became her new motto, for she did nothing to push herself out of her comfort zone. She simply existed. This was about the point where people stopped calling her a mermaid and started calling her a girl.

One night, the girl couldn’t sleep. She was used to hearing the crashing of the waves just outside her window, but after she fell into the dark hole, she kept her windows closed and her curtains shut. The girl knew it was a bad idea, but she felt an overwhelmingly strong urge to lift up her curtains and open her windows in order to hear the crashing waves and smell the salty air and see the receding shoreline one last time. One last time, she told herself. One last time to call herself a mermaid, one last time to actually believe that there would be a handsome merman there to sweep her off her feet. One last time.

And so the girl – no, the mermaid – threw open her curtains and jumped out of her window excitedly, in too much of a rush to even close the window behind her. She ran to the ocean wildly, the moon high in the sky, the sea breeze wafting through the humid air, and she drank up all of it, every inch of it. She laughed, a startling high-pitched noise that she found she liked very much. Her laughter carried up into the air as she ripped off her clothes and ran into the sea, not hesitating for even a moment. It was then, she realized, that she truly was in love. She had been from the first day she breathed in that salty sea air. But it wasn’t her merman she was in love with, no. It was the ocean. She had loved it from first sight, and it had loved her back even before then, and she was the only person in the world to not recognize this until it was nearly too late. But it wasn’t too late, for she had saved herself; or rather, the ocean had saved her. The mermaid, after much seeking, had finally found her own kind of love story.