Castles of Sand
Every day she came to gaze at him as he sat alone on the beach, staring at the ocean, his eyes misty as the sea in the early morning. He would sometimes throw rocks at the pounding surf but mostly he sat, mesmerized by the resounding strength of the sea's particular music, while she, a child of that music, would wait, watching, just offshore, her long blonde hair floating around her like a cloud, her sea-green eyes studying him from behind one of the many rocks that spotted that stretch of sea.
There was something about him that drew her every day to study, unobserved, the handsome man sitting on the beach. He was obsessed with the sea, gazing longingly and sadly at the gesturing waves, entranced by her majesty. Some days, he would be called by some strident voice from his beach house, but always he would return. Most days he sat uninterrupted, staring at the sea, just beyond its reach—never venturing in, never touching what so passionately held his attention.
It would not seem an interesting pastime, watching someone watching the sea, and yet, every day she left the myriad pleasures of the undersea to watch him. Something in him compelled her, fascinated her. She loved him.
A landman. It wasn't right to love a landman—it wasn't safe. Of the few merfolk who had been foolish enough to love landfolk, most had been able to repent before doing the unthinkable, before even thinking the unspeakable, but there were a few, a small handful in the vast history of those beautiful sea dwellers, that had forsaken their home world, who had become the whispered victims spoken about in tragic legend after tragic legend. There was no place in the gentle, carefree language of the merfolk for words of such a compulsion that all most treasured would be given up, thrown away out of passion for a mere landman.
Yet, it had been done. Of all fates, it was the most feared, the most fearful, and yet there were those who had done it, who were mourned as dead, as worse than dead, by those they left behind.
She, too, was a simple mermaid who knew no words to explain her obsession. How can one speak of a longing beyond words, of a pulling that brings you closer and closer to what you most fear? How can something so compelling be so wrong? How can one explain that the greatest nightmare becomes preferable to loneliness, to that special loneliness that can be cured by only one?
The process to remove one's tail is slow and painful, taking many hours. It is the pain of peeling off one's own skin and exposing raw flesh to the elements, to the briny touch of the sea. It is a bright bolt of pain, a burning only made worse by the water around it.
Even more painful is the knowledge that it is an almost irreversible act. To grow back the fragile tail will take weeks of inactivity at the bottom of the sea. Or worse, if the sun rises and sets while the mermaid still walks, the tail never will grow back and she will remain a landmaid forever.
Every bit of this she knew. Every legend, every tragic myth and fact she had heard told. Once, she had been frightened and shocked that some could forsake the teeming vibrant depths, rich in life and vivid color, for the unfeeling, unfriendly, colorless land above, that someone could go through such pain and torment for the love of some lowly land creature who could never know or understand the wonder of the world below.
Yet, somehow, she found herself drawn inexorably into that very world she despised. How could one give up the sea for some mortal? Yet, every day, she left it behind to gaze at the landman who sat by the sea. She had never spoken to him, did not know his name, or his temperament, but she loved him all the same. Somehow, he seemed worth whatever sacrifice.
Just before dawn, she shed her beautiful blue-green tail, stifling her screams as the salty ocean washed over her legs, seemingly whole and unblemished but raw as an open wound. Quietly, she rose from the sea, clothed only in her long golden hair, walking across sand still warm from the day before as her tender flesh silently screamed at the contact. The rising sun clothed her in a crimson radiance as the morning breeze caught her drying hair and carried it like a halo around her head. She stood before him, a golden goddess born of the sea, more beautiful than even Venus could have been, her sea-green eyes glowing with love for him.
The landman looked up, neither surprised nor impassioned for his eyes were filled with pity and sorrow. "Sit with me," he said softly, and she did, stretching her legs painfully upon the warming sand.
"Once," he began, as if he had been expecting her, as if she had done all she had done only to hear his story, "there was a man in love with a woman as few men had ever loved a woman before. He had seen her only once, but the vision filled him, haunted him, a vibrant shadow for his dreams, an obsession in his waking moments. He found his eyes searching for her constantly, and when he glimpsed her again, he felt the most profound satisfaction as well as the most violent hungering he had ever known.
"She was not beautiful, at least was not what he had, until then, considered beautiful. Her hair was short and the color of midnight, not the long honey-colored tresses he had always admired. The soft liquid eyes he had dreamed of as a young man did not compare to her hard brown ones. This was no gentle maid, but a strong woman, slim with long legs and a determined chin. It wasn't her beauty that entranced him but her strength, the power that was clear in every gesture, in her purposeful stride. It was that strength that made her beautiful to him, that made him love her. I had never known a woman like her.
"I loved her—love her still. I gave up everything for her. Someone so strong could not be asked to sacrifice, so I did, eager and glad to give up everything—for her. It was how it should be. I would lose everything to be with her, bathed in her strength. Did she not have enough for both of us? And she let me, loving me in her way as much as I loved her. But, a part of her love was contempt that I was satisfied to feed from her strength, that I was so weak that I would give up everything and ask for nothing in return, that my only strength was in my devotion to her.
"She loved me, but found less and less time to love me, finding other matters more pressing. After all, won't I still be there tomorrow? Isn't it the very strength she has, that strength that doesn't need me, what binds me to her? She knows I love her still . . . that I could never go back even if my love for her dried up and blew away on the early morning wind . . . But it hasn't. I am as bound to her now as on the first day I came to her, my past behind me . . ."
Then, he sat there, his eyes searching the sea, as if for the answer, the strength to make her need him. The mermaid watched him, her eyes studying the man she loved so strongly, so insanely, so vainly.
Above them, the sun began to slide down the sky, heading for its resting place in the depths of the sea. Finally, as the sun dipped through that final stretch of sky, he whispered, his eyes never leaving the crashing sea, "Were you what might have been?" He closed his eyes for just a moment.
Suddenly, he rose, brushing the sand from his clothes. "Go back where you come from, little one. There is nothing here like your dreams but castles of sand. That is no future for you." Then, he walked away, shoulders slumped, head low.
She looked at his retreating back with sea-green eyes filled with brine, then ran and dived into the setting sun, into the sea, where her tears mixed with the salty ocean. She never returned.
Through time, her memory of him became dim, although it never completely left her. In the depths of her home she found another and a full life with few regrets, no regrets except, perhaps, one . . .
A few days after the landman's encounter with the mermaid, her abandoned tail washed ashore and he picked it up gently, a look of wonder on his face. Cradling it carefully in his arms, he carried it through the house, past the den where is his wife spoke forcefully on the phone with one of her employees, and up the stairs to the attic where he opened an old sea-trunk. Delicately, he laid her cast-off tail . . . next to his own as his sea-green eyes filled with tears for the choice he had made.
Conjuring Dreams or Learning to Write by Writing Page 8