Box of Chocolates

Kai

Kai reached the coast a few moments before midnight.

The tall grass growing on the cliff swayed in the salty breeze, reaching him from the ocean, as if it was bowing to him. He walked through the supple stems, grey, drained of all colour by the darkness of the moonless night. Kai let them caress the bare skin of his legs as he ran his hand through them, caressing the soft grass in return.

This was his goodbye to this world, he was finally ready to go home-- a place he had never visited before.

He paused at the very edge of the precipice. The ocean, lying deep underneath, filling every inch of the world he could see from where he stood, looked angry and unstoppable, as black as the night sky without stars above his head. A pure, raw liquid magic.

Kai loved and feared it in equal measures; he was taught to respect and admire it since he was a little boy. He, a fisherman, a son of one and a grandson of another, grew up listening to endless stories about the ocean and merfolk, memorizing them, dreaming of underwater worlds.

And sometimes, always more rarely as the years passed, his father would tell him tales about his mother, his real mother whom he had never seen, could not remember.

She, Summer, came from the infinite ocean, one moonless night, carried by its frothy waves. Then left again, soon after Kai was born, his father would repeat countless times, over and over on long winter nights, his voice mostly a mere whisper, barely audible above the screaming and screeching of the wind rushing through the crevices in the ancient, time worn wooden walls of their beach hut.

She loved them, he would say, she would return...

But she never did.

Kai's father ceased talking about her eventually, and one day, he came home from the sea accompanied by a woman Kai didn't know. Soon enough, he had a new mother and a couple of siblings, none of whom he really asked for.

They were... different. No. He was different; he never quite belonged to this world. But only now when his home, the shrine of the mother he had never met was profaned by his father's new life, dedicated to his new family, he realised how very, unbearably different they... he was.

It was time to go home.

The ocean always whispered to him, inviting him to explore its fathomless depths, the texture, taste, and colours of its mercurial waters, to test the strength of its tides. To meet his real family.

At last, he was ready.

Kai removed his clothes and shoes and spread his arms wide. He let the warm summer wind run its invisible fingers up his spine, then push him, ever so gently, off the cliff. In seconds, he broke through the cool surface of the water and let the current take him, pull him towards the bottom, deeper and deeper.

He wasn't surprised to hear voices coming from the depths, which seemed completely dark at first, then brightened gradually. He had heard them before, low, sing-song whispers filling the world under the surface, whenever he swam, or dived. Nor was he amazed by being able to breathe freely underwater; he had noticed that, too.

But he had never met her-- the mer-woman beckoning him to follow her, floating at the edge of a forest of long, shiny, undulating waterweed.

She only looked half-human, a mermaid with wild, long curls dancing around her, and a glittery, scale-covered fish tail. But to him, she was beautiful, she was his mother.

She smiled and embraced him the moment he reached her, her dark hair coiling through his blonde. She pressed her palm to his forehead, projecting images and feelings into his mind. She could not put them into words he would understand, but she could show him.

Soon, he knew that she could not have stayed with him before even though she wanted to, and she suffered from their separation as much as he had. Kai understood that his father's love for her had not been strong enough to keep her in his world. He saw her waiting in this spot for him every moonless night.

I missed you so much, her eyes said, and he comprehended perfectly; he had missed her too.

He smiled at her, happy to have found his way home, into the bottomless abysses of the ocean, where he belonged.