Lovesick Little Page 7
The next day, she woke up feeling even emptier and lonelier than she had before. After a silent breakfast by herself in the courtyard, she swam very slowly out of the palace and up through the water. Like she had been doing all autumn, winter and spring, she made the long trek to the North Pacific and began to rise to the surface in front of Gabriel’s place. After ample thought and consideration, the princess decided that after this day she would never again visit, for as much as she missed him with all her heart, she thought it best not to waste her life pining for someone who may or may not even exist anymore.
When she reached the top, the day was warm and sunny and the fragrance of a thousand flower blossoms filled the air. She swam in a little closer and as she approached the breaker, noticed that she was sharing the water with scores of surfers out there bobbing on their boards or standing up riding the waves. Curiously, she moved in closer, even though she knew she was in great danger of being seen. Then, only a few feet behind the surfer farthest out, the unmistakable scent of him carried out upon the wind. Instantly, she knew it was him right there in front of her!
She ducked back under and let out an elated scream of joy while she spun in hoops and marveled at her unbelievably good fortune. It seemed unlikely and impossible that after all that waiting, he was there, right in front of her, with nothing between them but a bit of churning water. She swam under his feet as he let them dangle off the sides of his board, and when she reached out a finger to touch one, she giddily watched him flinch away. As a wave rolled toward him and he paddled in to catch it, she let herself tumble along the sand beneath him, looking up as he balanced on his board right above her. He had no idea that there was a little mermaid right under him, watching him enthusiastically and applauding his impressive skills.
Her cheeks were pink with exhilaration as she secretly played with him, never more than a few feet away but invisible so long as she stayed beneath the surface, obscured by weeds and dark slimy things. After each ride, she watched him slide belly-first back onto his board and paddle back out, propelled by his strong arms and cupped hands. After a while, she began to get bolder, swimming even closer to him, running her fingers along the board’s smooth resin and investigating its four plastic rudders that seemed to mimic her own pelvic fins. As he paddled out, she was careful not to let his arms and hands hit her, but allowed his fingers to run unknowingly through her long hair, letting him think he was just touching a bit of sea vine.
Growing bored of hiding from him and desperately wanting him to see her, she threw caution to the wind and popped her head up out of the water, allowing her face and milky white shoulders to sit in plain view. Her tail was hidden beneath the surface but even still, allowing herself to be seen at all went against the most important rule her father had ever given her. Today, though, her father and his rigid law seemed far beneath her so she did what her heart told her and surfaced just a few yards ahead of him, smiling like the happiest girl on land or sea.
When the bright sun reflected off of her ornate necklace, the shimmer caught his eye and he steered away from her just in time to avoid letting his board strike her in the face. He lost his balance and fell backwards into the water and when he came back up, he looked for her but she was nowhere to be found. Meanwhile, the mischievous little mermaid giggled uncontrollably to herself under the water, intoxicated and dizzy after their close encounter and feeling as though her ribs could burst open from the pressure of her pounding heart. Gabriel kept his eyes trained on the water, thinking that whoever it was he saw in the water would eventually have to come up for air. He waited several minutes for her, but she never did come back up.
Gabriel’s perplexity was interrupted by the sound of his friend Rourke’s unimpressed voice. “Dude, what are you looking for?” he asked, sitting back on his board and watching for the next set of waves. “Saw your bail; that was embarrassing. Good thing there are no girls out here today.”
“Did you see that girl that was just here?” asked Gabriel, pointing to the water and looking confused. Rourke shook his head and spoke like he was talking to a three-year-old.
“No. Like I just said, there are no girls out here today.” Gabriel scratched his head. “But there was a girl, and she was right here in the water a minute ago. I almost hit her with my board - that’s why I bailed!”
Rourke rolled his eyes. “Don’t tell me you’re lame enough to blame your bail on a chick that’s not even here, Gabe.”
“Seriously!” Gabriel insisted. “She popped up right in front of me, I tried to pivot around her and then fell. Now I don’t see her anywhere.”
“That’s because there are no girls out here today,” reiterated Rourke.
“I wouldn’t make this up,” said Gabriel. “I swear I saw a girl in the water.”
“What did she look like?” asked Rourke, interested as always.
“I only saw her for a brief second,” Gabriel responded, thinking.
Rourke furrowed his brows. “If you can’t even describe one girly characteristic, how can you presume it was a girl?”
“Because she had long hair and a girly face,” offered Gabriel.
“What color?” asked Rourke.
“White,” said Gabriel
“Her hair was white?!” Rourke threw his hands up in the air.
“No, she was white. Very white. Her hair was, I dunno, blonde. Honey blonde. But also kinda white. Really light honey-white blond.”
“Hot?” asked Rourke.
“Like I said, only saw her for a second,” said Gabriel.
“HOT?!” repeated Rourke, growing impatient.
“She was pretty,” answered Gabriel.
A sly smile of disbelief crept across Rourke’s face. “If there were girls out today, I’d be flexing mad nuts, perfecting my dirty layback. I certainly would NOT be sitting here with you discussing the possibility that there might be girls in the water that I didn’t see come out. After all these years you’ve known me, don’t you think my peripherals are conditioned to spot a pretty blond if she swam out?!”
Gabriel paused for a moment then acquiesced like he often did, not because Rourke was necessarily right, but because it was so rarely worth arguing over. “You’re right,” he said sarcastically. “There could not have been a girl out here ‘cause you’d have definitely seen her first.”
Rourke nodded and scanned the beach with his beady eyes. “I would’ve smelled her approaching,” he said slimily, grinning like a hungry crocodile.
“I have no doubts,” said Gabriel in mock solemnity. “She must have just been another vision.”
“Wait a sec …” said Rourke, grappling to pull up a memory that had gone fuzzy after years of regular pot smoking. Suddenly his tone was one of concern and he asked his friend, “Are you having visions of Dagmara again?”
This was not the first time Gabriel had thought he saw a girl in the water that just wasn’t there. On several occasions while out on his board, he thought he’d seen the face of his long-lost twin sister appear to him in the water’s wavy reflections.
Dagmara had gone missing after a solo surf one evening several years earlier. Gabriel had been out with friends that night or he would have been in the water with her, a fact that never ceased to make him feel somewhat responsible when he thought about it. The friends she had been surfing with had long since packed it in for the day but she stayed out, alone like she usually preferred it, to be the only dark silhouette against the deep red horizon. Dagmara was an inspired surfer who was always searching, always pushing herself to improve which often meant staying out in the water longer than anyone. When the skies had turned dark that night and her daughter had not yet come in, Lucia went out to find her but by then she’d already vanished. Only her board was left behind sitting neatly in the sand, and there was a set of footprints from it going straight down to the water. She called a search party and they scoured the water, coast, and forests, but could find her nowhere. Dagmara was never seen or heard from again.
After a few more hours of paddling hard and perfecting tricks, the guys finally tired themselves out and went in for dinner. With a strange and wonderful lightness in her soul, she sang her most joyous songs all the way back to the palace. The fruitless months she had spent looking for him now seemed like dark and distant memories compared with the unreal beauty of being as close to him as she had been that day.
When she arrived at the palace, songs that dripped with the sweet honey of young love still fell from her lips, permeating the quiet stillness of the halls. Her father, having grown increasingly suspicious of where it was she kept swimming off to, had ordered her to be followed that day. By the time she returned that evening, her whole family had already been given a detailed account of everything she’d been up to at the surface. Upon her arrival, she was met by two of her father’s guards who ushered her to the grand hall where they were all waiting for her. As soon as she entered the room, she knew she had been caught.
All five of her sisters looked up at her with sad, worried eyes while her father wore the arduous expression he always wore when he was about to make the kinds of difficult decisions that only a king and a father could be charged with. As her sisters got up to leave the room, each in turn gave her a kiss as they filed past her, wishing her luck. She hung her head low, bracing herself for a reprimanding. Taking a deep breath, she looked up at her grandmother whom she could usually count on to lighten up the situation. This day, the old queen’s face was stoic and austere as she sat on her throne with her hands folded in her lap. The little mermaid knew right away that she was in deep, unavoidable trouble.
“Are you aware, daughter, that your actions today have put everyone in this kingdom in grave danger?” The king’s stern voice bellowed out through the grand hall, making all the walls rumble with the serious nature of his words.
The mermaid closed her eyes and nodded. “But I only let him see me for a moment. I swam away fast; he did not see my tail!” After she admitted to her actions, she looked up at her father’s face expecting it to be angry but was surprised to find it had already faded some. Usually he was a hard man when it came to addressing important security matters but right now as he sat before his incorrigible teenage daughter, he simply wore the face of a concerned and loving parent.
“I’m sorry, Father,” she said. “I know I acted recklessly, and I shall never go in so close again. You have my word.” But even as the words escaped her lips, she knew there was nothing that could stop her from seeing him again.
Her father, the wise, all-knowing king of the seas, could see right through her bold-faced lie. “Daughter, you must understand my position,” he said in a voice that was far less stern than she was expecting. “For the safety of all of our kind, I cannot allow you to visit the surface ever again.”
The mermaid looked up at her father disbelievingly. She even smiled for a second in hopes that he was joking, because the idea of being forbidden from the surface was an idea far too bleak to wrap her head around. But the king was serious, and his word was law.
“Father, my soul has carried me to his and I’ve been powerless to pull away. My heart beats for his, Father. I must be allowed to see him, or strike me dead right here and now for there will be no life for me without him.”
The king was taken aback; he had underestimated just how afflicted his youngest daughter was. His face softened up even more. “Daughter, you are so young. I remember first infatuation, and though it has all the symptoms of love, it is not the same thing.”
The princess shook her head, and would hear of nothing that suggested this was anything less than true love. “He is my match, Father,” she insisted. “I feel it in my bones when I am near him. When I am not near him, I feel nothing but emptiness.”
“You are well aware of the situation,” he said. “We are different from the humans. You heard your sisters’ reports! We must keep our existence a secret from them for the rest of our time here, and that is final.”
She scowled. “He is not like the rest of them!” she exclaimed desperately. “He loves the ocean and today I saw him dance upon it more beautifully than anything I’ve ever seen! I love the human world so much, and I love him with my whole heart. I know that I will not lead our kind back to this planet, even though I would love to. So I want to see the world above while I live here in the blue! I want to experience it all so that when it is time for me to go, I will have seen it all and will be satisfied.”
The queen cast her eyes down to the eight beautiful oysters clamped to her tail. The oysters served as both a symbol of her royal status as well as a reminder of the immense responsibility that went along with it. It was royal duty to put the welfare of the kingdom before all else and today, her young progeny would learn the hard way that no mer-person who makes themself known to a human would be free to ever do it again.
“You will not love a human, Princess,” she said sternly but softly. “As a daughter of the seas, your place is here.”
The littlest mermaid shook her head in frustration. “But I have chosen him! And he will choose me, I know he will!” she said passionately. “I have already fallen in love with him; it’s already too late to turn back!”
The king looked his daughter up and down with his slate grey eyes, in disbelief of what she was saying. “If he learns of our world,” he said, “his kind will find us eventually, and when they do, their crusade of exploitation will not end until they have destroyed our whole world for profit.”
The mermaid lowered her head. She knew that she could not argue, because everything he was saying about humans had already been proven. But she didn’t care, for something inside her had awakened the day she saved him and she was addicted to the feeling of being close to him. Now fiercely dependent on being in his proximity, the princess was helpless to pull away.
“Father, I realize it makes no sense to you, but there is nothing you can do to stop me from loving him, for I must follow my own heart.” Then she bowed to her mighty father and turned to swim away to her room, hoping he wouldn’t challenge it, at least for the night. But behind her, the king sighed regretfully and then spoke, his deep voice echoing out into the courtyard.
“I am sorry, daughter, but I am afraid it has already been done.” As the words hit her ears, they sent chills up her spine and an aching to her chest. Suddenly, it all became clear to her and she knew exactly what he meant. Without a second’s hesitation, she flapped her tail wildly and took off like a shot, propelling herself straight up towards the surface. The closer she got, the harder she pushed her strong, pretty tail to carry her even faster to where the water would end and the sky would begin. She braced herself, then, as she went to jump through the threshold, slammed into it so hard, she swore she felt her bones crack. Just as she had feared, her father had ordered the gateway to the upper world closed off to her as a security me
asure for the benefit of their entire race. It was as if a shiny pane of thick glass enrobed the ocean’s surface, creating a ceiling that was hard and impenetrable. Frantically, she backed up and hurled her body into it again, trying desperately to break it, throwing all her weight at it in a vain effort to make just one little crack, but to no avail. She pounded her fists against it like she was being buried alive and screamed so loud one would’ve expected it to shatter but it held strong as solid stone and her every painful attempt was quashed.
Defeated, she resigned from her futile endeavor and let her limp, sore body sink back down to the palace where her father and grandmother still sat on their thrones, wearing pitying expressions for she whose dreams had just been dashed. It saddened them both deeply to cage her in but they did not know what else they could do when she was such a liability.
The princess stood before them, staring them both down from behind her sad, tired eyes that carried a fury in them that flickered intermittently between moments of understanding and regret. She knew she had left them no choice. So the sad little mermaid bowed her head and turned and swam out to her garden to be alone. When she was quite sure that no one had followed her, she wrapped her arms around her marble statue and wept, sobbing bitterly until she fell asleep curled up at its feet. And just like all the other mermaids, she was unable to shed a single tear, and so the unreleased, exquisite pain of her heartbreak just kept recycling itself throughout her body, mind and soul, hollowing out her heart and torturing the poor girl all through the cold night.