Experiencer

In my youth, summers were when I could fully embody my mermaid inclinations. I went daily to the Phelps Luck pool and swam until my skin was pruny and my hair stank of chlorine. Well, “swam” isn’t exactly accurate, it was more like frolicking, twisting and twirling in the water, fully inhabiting the glimmering mysterious watery world.

Most of the time I was choreographing synchronized routines to Duran Duran songs or playing underwater games, and during adult swim I would retreat with friends to the hot showers and linger there for what felt like hours.

Water has made me happy my whole life. I feel most at home in the water, floating effortlessly. Truth is, water makes most humans happy. Aquatic ape theory, anyone? We humans just seem to need the water as if we evolved in it.

Growing up, my brother and I would visit our father in Phoenix, Arizona for a couple of weeks each summer. Ideal time to be in that god forsaken city, eh?

My dad’s pool was my refuge. I would lay in the blistering sun, slather myself in baby oil, and swim all day long.

Hours and hours of somersaults, backflips, twirling myself into trance, so content by myself underwater. Later in life when I found ecstatic dance, I would realize this is what I was doing in the pool. Dancing myself into a trance. In my own little magical world, watching the light reflect the water and feeling so at peace, in awe, in another magical world that I belonged in.

When I laid in the sun, I imagined it smiling down on me, warm and alive. Me, just one of billions of tiny specks scattered across Earth. In my mind I would zoom upward, lifting above the thousands of glittering pools in Phoenix, Arizona, up and up until I could see the whole picture at once. From that height, humans looked like ants, each of us caught in our own little world, each convinced our reality was special and unique. Zooming out was a skill I leaned young, gaining perspective from a birds eye view.

In addition to being a mermaid, I’ve also been a sun worshipper since my youth. Are these two things synonymous, I wonder? Who knows. But early on, I made a simple deal with the sun: how about I love you, and you love me? We both agreed and the rest is history.

It felt obvious, almost sacred, to give reverence to the being that makes life possible here on Earth. The creative intelligence who created the colors, the warmth, the plants. The feeling of the sun on my skin is still nothing short of religious.

Zooming in, I felt how small I was under that blazing sky, but at the same time I felt deeply in touch with magic. Laying poolside on my towel, I’d close my eyes just enough to catch the maximum rainbows glinting off my eyelashes. Tiny kaleidoscopes of color, always there but rarely cherished, danced across my eyelids. I’d watch the shifting patterns for hours. When the sun became too much, I was a mermaid once again, sinking into my secret ocean.

And here is the clincher: I have webbed toes! My second and third toe on my left foot are linked like lovers. I was terribly embarrassed about this anomaly as a kid and was convinced I was deformed. My mom promised me we could get them “fixed” if I still felt that way at sixteen. Somehow before then I got a gift to a reflexologist. I asked them about my weird toes.

“Have you ever considered that you’re more evolved?” they asked me, half-joking, watching me wriggle those strange, magical toes.

“Maybe we humans are evolving to go back to the water. Or maybe it’s a sign you came from the water not so long ago.”

That was all I needed to hear. In that instant, I decided I wasn’t going to operate on those toes.

They weren’t a flaw. They were a clue, a talisman.

******

On the afternoon when I experienced the bath that changed my life, I was gazing at those webbed toes, wondering, letting my imagination wander. The water around me seemed to hum with possibility, and suddenly a story poured in. It was a download, a huge package of information received at once.

It was a love story, of beings from other realms, telepathy, time travel, romance, and a world both familiar and utterly unknown, a mermaid story.

In that moment, I began to understand that the fascination I had always felt for the water and for mermaids was connected to something larger, divinely mysterious, and still unfolding in my life.

I have always been curious about my tenth grandmother on my mother’s side. She had no last name. She married a very wealthy man, though no one knows exactly how he came by his fortune. He could have been a king’s bastard son or a criminal trickster, both with records under his name. He sailed widely around Barbados, and sometimes I wonder, was this ancestor of mine a mermaid? She had only one name, Anne, and the rest is a mystery. I dream that perhaps Anne was magic, that he found her in the Caribbean sea, and they fell in love. The enigma of these two delights me.

I still have mermaid fantasies everytime I dance. Ever since the bathtub incident, I slip into that skin in my imagination whenever I move.

My body feels liquid, flowing through currents that ripple around me, my hair and limbs drifting like kelp in a hidden ocean. Every gesture sends shimmering waves through the air, brushing against invisible streams of energy. Twice a week, for several hours at a time, this has become my practice, a dedicated space to play with my imagination in dance, swimming through plasma that feels alive, tactile, and endlessly fluid.