{"id":17787,"date":"2022-06-17T12:00:49","date_gmt":"2022-06-17T17:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/?p=17787"},"modified":"2022-06-16T05:37:23","modified_gmt":"2022-06-16T10:37:23","slug":"swell-the-story-of-the-sailor-and-the-mermaid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/archives\/17787","title":{"rendered":"Swell, The Story of the Sailor and the Mermaid"},"content":{"rendered":"

2022 Porch Prize Winner in Nonfiction\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

It is negative ten outside, unusual for February in Kentucky. I hear the crunch of her footsteps stamp into the snow on my front porch. I open the door. Her cheekbones absorb the light. Her eyes climb me.<\/p>\n

Twelve years ago, the Sailor was my first girlfriend and my first love.\u00a0 For over twelve years we\u2019d flirted, fucked and dated, we\u2019d never transitioned from lovers to friends. Tonight she is my sleepover-more-than-friend friend.<\/p>\n

Sleeping over was her request at first. \u201cI\u2019m lonely,\u201d she explained over the phone several months ago. \u201cWhy don\u2019t you come over? No sex, just spooning.\u201d<\/p>\n

I laughed. \u201cThat sounds agonizing? Can we really just<\/em> sleep together? \u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy not?\u201d She dared me.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t admit it, but I wanted to be close too, so I agreed. I convinced myself I could restrain my body, protect my heart. But in the months since our sleepovers began, the strong yearning for more continued to bob between us like buoys. We\u2019d entered into dangerous seas.<\/p>\n

When we are together, our bodies swell. We crave each other’s smells and tastes.\u00a0 It has always been this way with us. Why do we still feel each other\u2019s emotions and what does it mean now that we are no longer partnered?<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

One of my favorite myths is Celtic, the Irish\u2019s mermaid story. In it a selkie is a creature who turns human when she disrobes from her sealskin. A fisherman falls in love with the woman and hides her magic cloak. She begs to return to the sea but he refuses. In the end the woman escapes with their child. The will to be fully ourselves and free, the pull of home, turns out to be the greatest current.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Despite our shared ability to feel the other\u2019s emotions, we are not the same. I am white and femme presenting, often passing as straight. The Sailor is Black and butch. The world treats us differently. Evident when she was arrested for smoking outside a club. She told me the correction officers sneered at her during the intake process, \u201cWhat cell do we put you in–the male or female?\u201d Then, they demanded she undress.<\/p>\n

The same cops would not have arrested me. The cops would not have questioned me. We share this knowledge but we do not talk about it. What does it mean that we feel each other\u2019s emotions but cannot talk about these differences? These are the questions we have yet to unravel in our entire decade of knowing each other.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

When I first met the Sailor, I was studying Pan-African Studies at the University, waking up to my white privilege and learning the history of the world from Black scholars and activists. She was proud of me. It was also a reminder of the breach between us: racism, hundreds of years of oppression.<\/p>\n

Inside our bed, or as we wandered Louisville, Kentucky\u2019s sidewalks, our ancestors\u2019 pasts were like a vortex. Every day we grew closer, we also ebbed further apart when I didn\u2019t talk about racism and our relationship. This silence anchored our emotional intimacy in place. We never told each other the truth about all the ways the world continued to affirm me while casting her further aside. As if not speaking it out loud would make it less true. We knew it but we didn\u2019t name it.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t bring up conversations about race with the Sailor because I didn\u2019t want to acknowledge what could never be fully mended.\u00a0 I would do my own work of undoing racism inside of the world and myself. But I could never be other than what I was. White. White like the officers that stripped searched her after being racially profiled, white like the boss that passed her over for a raise, white like the police that were acquitted for murdering Black people over and over again. I was ashamed about how my whiteness was complicit in the traumas of her life. Instead of claiming this, I allowed it to silence me. I didn\u2019t have the language to talk about our interracial relationship when we were younger, I\u2019m not sure I do even now.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

After dinner, the live stream of another murder booms from her Facebook feed. She shuts her computer. Her breath shortens. It is the winter after another summer of too many Black boys murdered by the cops. It is winter and there are more Black deaths by white cops who will not be held accountable over and over and over again. Nothing changes.<\/p>\n

Her narrow fingers tap against the bamboo tabletop synching with the drip, drip, drip<\/em> from the kitchen faucet. I rise from my chair. I pause for a moment; I contemplate placing my hands on her shoulder. Instead, I walk to the sink. I turn the valve. The water stops. Her fingers stop.<\/p>\n

I remember the day ten years ago, when her twenty-five-year-old cousin was shot in his car. At his vigil, in an apartment parking lot, candles were handed out among the crowd of 20 without ceremony. They cast a dim light.\u00a0 Most were familiar with the routine. But this was my first vigil. I stood behind her on the outer rim of the circle.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want you with me,\u201d she had said hours before. In the crowd, she was rigid. My white hand barely a comfort on her Black back. I could not feel her. It was as though she had drifted someplace I would never reach.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

In the myth, the sailor character represents masculinity, patriarchy and white supremacy. The mermaid, the wild, nature and what is indigenous.\u00a0 Both are required to give up a part of where they come from to be together, the sailor, land, and the mermaid, water. The story is about colonization and domination. Despite this, the Sailor and I adopted this myth as our own. In the story we told each other, I was the mermaid and she was the sailor. Reinterpreting the myth was our attempt at reimagining power and privilege in our relationship.<\/p>\n

One Halloween I painted blue iridescent scales across my cheekbones and wrapped filmy fabric around my legs. She donned her US Navy uniform. For a night, I was a real mermaid, she was a proper sailor. In our story, we never left each other\u2019s sides.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

After a few months of dating I asked the Sailor to live with me. On move in day, she dropped a black duffle bag onto the bedroom floor. Afternoon sun flooded the apartment. She gazed down at the contents of her life. She pulled out a brass candleholder. A leather journal. A coffee mug. Underneath these artifacts, folded jeans and shirts shaped into perfect triangle sails. \u201cIs this all you have?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cYes, this is all I need.\u201d\u00a0 Her hard edges were still softening from the Navy and, what I would later understand as, PTSD.<\/p>\n

Friday night dates were bought with our newly acquired credit cards. She wore pressed jeans and unfolded her neatly triangular Polos. I wore silk blouses in shades of ocean. We drank wine and scrawled poetry onto napkins with pens we borrowed from bartenders. Then we pressed them into the other\u2019s palm, and slipped them into our pockets, later reading them to each other at the kitchen table in the candlelight. For the first time in a romantic relationship, my body was fully present. I was open to her touch, her gaze, and our future.<\/p>\n

Our romance and sex was like nothing I\u2019d ever experienced before. Even at twenty-six, I\u2019d already had more sexual partners than I could remember. Gruff men who fucked me as I lay unmoving on dirty sheets. Dinner dates turned into love affairs with people who never really knew me. And when I was seventeen, my boyfriend who\u2019d moved into my apartment and, for three years, spent nights wandering alleyways for smack and sex, and then returned to rape me. The Sailor understood, she had also been pierced by the unwanted hooks of men who didn\u2019t stop at \u201cno.\u201d<\/p>\n

In bed with the Sailor, she listened as I quietly outlined these traumas.\u00a0 She gently mapped my body with her fingertips. She placed her hands on my cheeks, looked into my eyes and said, \u201cYou are safe with me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Our weekends together were reserved for catching up on the \u201cL Word\u201d in bed. Her candle burned inside the brass holder, her mug next to the bed steaming with coffee. Our clothes from the night before floating in a sea of morning light. I paused the laptop when steamy scenes climaxed. I reached for her body; I followed my desire, something I was still learning how to do. I opened my legs. She moved her mouth to my ankles. I had not wanted someone\u2019s tongue and fingers like I wanted her lapping, cresting at my inner thighs, my dark pink nipples firm, my unhooked hips. Awaiting her plunge. I wanted to fill her mouth with me.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat do you want to do with your life?\u201d I asked after hours of sex — our limbs driftwood — the sheets a tangled net.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to go into Tech, and you want to change the world.\u201d Her eyes glistened as she traced my face and then pulled me closer.<\/p>\n

\u201cHey!\u201d I protested, instantly growing wet again. She kissed me hard.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to be together. Let\u2019s do it all together.\u201d<\/p>\n

I gulped. \u201cOkay.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The tide of our sex pulled us away from our daily problems and back into each other. I made up tales for us at bedtime where all the heroes were queer and free. When she had trouble sleeping, I lured her back onto our ship and told the story of the mermaid and the sailor. The story of us. Our love cast a protective net around us, as long as we omitted certain truths.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

In some versions of the mermaid and sailor myth, the sailor gives up land and legs and drowns in the sea. Despite the sailor\u2019s love, lungs do not work underwater. In other versions of the tale, the mermaid gives up the world of water, a great sacrifice but one she deems worth it for partnership.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

The Sailor and I had both grown up early in the ways that poverty and being the older children of single mamas require.<\/p>\n

Weekly as a youth, I navigated my father\u2019s sporadic drunken phone calls from truck stops along the rocky California shore, or some other place from which he\u2019d send ocean postcards that, no matter how colorful and glossy, to my seven-year-old, ten-year-old, fifteen-year-old eyes simply reminded me he was absent.<\/p>\n

The Sailor\u2019s father died when she was young. She tucked a yellow toned photo of him in her leather journal. They looked so alike they could have been twins. But she never knew him. She and I discovered early on how to need little from our mother\u2019s who were tending to children, stress and loneliness<\/p>\n

To distract ourselves, The Sailor learned how to knot code together and created computer programs. I wrote fairy tales about life underwater. We experienced pain but we learned how to survive it without talking about it. We remained committed to our escape even as adults.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

The kitchen window reflects long languid moonlight across the walls. I feel the freezing Kentucky winter seeping through plaster. I shiver. I press the heat up a few degrees as the Sailor and I move into my bedroom.<\/p>\n

As my sleepover friend but more-than-friend, we are familiar with the routine and slip easefully into my gray velvet covers. The mattress takes us like a ship. We have shared a lot of life together. We have voyaged through career changes, cross country moves, and other lovers. I have been married, birthed two kids, and I am now divorced. She finished one master\u2019s degree and is completing another. We felt out of place as twenty-year-olds and out of place as thirty-year-olds. Both of us just wanted to belong. We don\u2019t say it now but we still wonder if we belong together. These questions give me a headache. I\u2019d rather avoid them, like we avoid using words for much of our pain.<\/p>\n

Beside her in bed, I am cautious. Despite this, every time she touches me, I remember how twelve years ago, we tasted every part of each other until our bodies crescendoed. She slides her fingers past my hips and into my palm. Our hands form a tightly closed shell.<\/p>\n

My head nestles in the nook of her shoulder and neck; she braids her left socked foot under my right sockless one like a rope. I want her hand to move below the stretched elastic of my black mesh underwear.\u00a0 I want to feel our nakedness, our abandon again.<\/p>\n

I remember the nights back in our apartment. At bedtime, sometimes she would turn away from me without explanation. \u201cNot now,\u201d she\u2019d mumble, collapsing into herself. I would lay my hand tenderly on her back wanting to comfort her, but also yearning to be closer. Those nights I struggled to feel like she wanted me as much as I wanted her.\u00a0 Now, I wish I could have needed less from her during what I\u2019d later learn were her lowest points. I wish I had named the currents that pulled us apart. I wish I had talked to her about my fears of hurting her because of my whiteness. My fear about abandonment. I wish I had asked her what she needed most and even more, that I knew.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Afro-futuristic versions of the mermaid myth understand mermaids as ancestors, enslaved Africans who jumped or were thrown overboard during the Atlantic slave trade. In a Greek version of the myth, mermaids are ghosts. Christopher Columbus is one of the few sailors who recorded sightings of mermaids in his ship\u2019s log. A haunting premonition of the genocide to come.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

After one year of living together, the Sailor suddenly moved to New York and in with a South Asian woman she\u2019d met at a queer conference. Over email she explained she wanted to be with a woman of color. A few months later she returned to Kentucky and asked to move back in with me. \u201cI love you,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love you too.\u201d I took her heaving body into mine. Our salty tears fell into each other\u2019s mouths. This marked a new ebb and flow of breakups and makeups — never quite wanting to let go, but also never fully reckoning with the reasons for the first or second or fifth departure. Those were issues for adults and we were young. It was easier to avoid conversation.<\/p>\n

After what felt like our final break up, I left Louisville and moved to Tennessee. I left because everything reminded me of her — the green hills of Kentucky, our sun flooded apartment. Even the napkin poems which surfaced at the least opportune moments, like a message in a bottle destined to reach my shore.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

As a child, I learned how to live in a fantasy world as a survival mechanism. I was obsessed with mermaids. I played with my Mermaid Barbie with flame orange hair, a tailfin silky and translucent in my baths at night. I dressed her in lake grass in the summer. Every time I swam, I imagined myself with fins flipping away from everything that scared me.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

We both live in Kentucky again and soon we will turn forty. It feels like time to choose our future. It feels like forty is an age when we should be more certain about who we are and what we are to each other.\u00a0 She circles my thumb with her index finger; I interlace my fingers firmly into hers.<\/p>\n

In my gray bed, I drift closer to her spine\u2019s curve. I want to ask her to touch me.<\/p>\n

\u201cI like having you here,\u201d I say.<\/p>\n

\u201cI like being here.\u201d<\/p>\n

What I don\u2019t say is a tsunami of everything unsaid.<\/p>\n

I time travel to a future when she has a girlfriend or when I am in love with someone else. I miss her already.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat will happen to us?\u201d I ask.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we turn forty?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo, between us. What are we, what is this?\u201d I push.<\/p>\n

She doesn\u2019t respond quickly. We\u2019ve shared twelve years of loving each other in and out of relationships, if it hasn\u2019t worked out, surely it never will — and yet we continue to circle.<\/p>\n

Before, she would have said, \u201cI love you, Jardana\u201d Instead, she responds, \u201cWe don\u2019t want the same things, Jardana.\u201d<\/p>\n

We are adults that are no longer willing to let go of our differences. My polyamory, her monogamy. My kids, her need for space. Then there is what neither of us can change. My whiteness, her Blackness.<\/p>\n

We became queer together. Learned to trust our passion together, opened our hearts to each other. We discovered pleasure against the pull and press of each other\u2019s fingers and tongues. Even now it is easy to recall the feeling of how she moved softly inside of me and then hard as though we\u2019d plug in all the holes we\u2019d been yearning to fill our whole lives. Together we did and we didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to marry you,\u201d she\u2019d say after years of not seeing each other. She\u2019d hold her breath.<\/p>\n

I would respond, \u201cI want to marry you, too.\u201d She\u2019d exhale.<\/p>\n

Now her words chart a different course. \u201cWe don\u2019t want the same things.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is nothing I wanted more than to love her. But, sometimes we are still learning how to love ourselves and don\u2019t yet know how to love another.<\/p>\n

My fingertips trace the raised nautical star tattoo on her right hand. I\u2019ve been touching her here for over twelve years. Inside, I feel the swell. The story of us. Shift. The Sailor pulls up the anchor. I hold on a little longer.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jardana Peacock\u00a0(They\/Them) is a queer, nonbinary writer and white antiracist activist. Their writing is featured in Pigeon Pages, YES! Magazine, Feminist Wire, and elsewhere. They serve as the Director of Development at PeoplesHub and facilitate other rad projects. They love the mountains and the water. They live in unceded Shawnee and Cherokee land (Louisville, KY) with their two kids, cat Tuna and chickens. Find them on instagram at: @jardana.<\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

2022 Porch Prize Winner in Nonfiction\u00a0 It is negative ten outside, unusual for February in Kentucky. I hear the crunch of her footsteps stamp into the snow on my front porch. I open the door. Her cheekbones absorb the light. Her eyes climb me. Twelve years ago, the Sailor was my first girlfriend and my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2272,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[73],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Jypy-4CT","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17787"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2272"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17787"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17787\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17840,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17787\/revisions\/17840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}