Mermaid.

chương 1

Seul

A ray of sunlight breaks through the ocean’s darkness to Seul’s head, knocking him out of his dream. He wakes up, lazily shoving away the cluster of seaweeds by his side, burying his head more profoundly in the pillow and pretending that the startle didn’t just happen. He gives up after a few more failed attempts. The dream isn’t coming back, neither is his sleep, and the comfort of not facing the world awakened.
For all its worth, Seul doesn’t hate the sea, he just doesn’t like being very conscious of it. His first breath was under the sea, engulfed by the calmness underwater, and the sea shall it be where he breathes his last. It’s a part of nature, a cycle that Seul isn’t so fond of but has no reason to resent. And yet, sometimes he finds himself zoning out, sauntering away from the corals and the seabed, up through beyond the faltering water surface, tracing the sunlights for the place where it dances directly on the residents’ skin.

The merpeople call the land up there the up-above as if they’re afraid that any name more interesting may trigger their offspring’s curiosity. They aren’t completely wrong, the term does sound stale enough to smother any wish for exploration. Still, it doesn’t work, at least for Seul. He has a mind of his own, and he knows that a rancid name can’t prevent him from acting to his heart’s desire.

Seul has a word he prefers, it's poetic, and it rhymes with birth, like a suggestion about the land up there is where the capturing desires are born, be it yearning, excitement, love, or the other thousands of unnamed emotions that he can barely share heart-to-heart with the merpeople. The Earth.

The merpeople don’t know much about the Earth, they don’t even question it. It’s passed down, generation to generation, that the humans walking up there are of a different species. And if there’s anything Seul’s sure about his kind, it’s that ever since their first bubble, they’ve been taught not to give a second damn to those who don't share their blood, no matter how similar the blood can be.
That is to say, Seul doesn’t know where his wonders about the Earth started – probably after the fever he had when he just had the mere basic awareness of the world around him, which, according to his parents, almost sent him to a one-way trip to the fish cemetery at the darker sea but he bravely made it through the roughest patches to grow up and become the beautiful young man he is now.
Seul doubts that there are parts of this story his parents insist on keeping secret for the sake of convincing themselves of their son’s sanity, the parts where his sickness managed to wreck his sanity for good, filling his head up with bizarre imagination and questions, making him a fish what always wants to be out of water.

Regardless, he likes to think of himself as a free-willed explorer, born with a unique desire and trailing on his seabed of life as a melodramatic loner. He shall live through it all with only one desire, to wander to where no merperson ever thought of seeing, and to indulge himself in what no merperson ever dreams of feeling.

For Seul, the Earth is where his wishes are realized, and although it's alluring, it's a dream that forever stays unspoken inside his heart. Merpeople don't have feet to walk on the land or bodies that can endure the absence of water for too long. Most of them don’t have the ears for his wandering thoughts, either.
Yet, he keeps it up, in the hope that one day he may find the solution for the obstacles and can walk on Earth like any of the humans up there. He knows the Earth must be the right place that's worth all of his efforts and thinking, partially by instinct, and mostly by the fact that there’s only the sea and the land in this world, and the sea has disappointed him with its repetition of water, fish, coral, and sand, for ages.
Whatever is going on up there is more diverse and alluring, even at the rudimentary level of Seul’s limited observation, his occasional resurfacing, watching humans’ ships float by, observing their behaviors from a distance, and imagining he’s one of them.
Seul lets the water around him glub, and looks again, for the tenth-or-how-many-ever time, at the blinking surface above, feeling the warmth from the sunlight dying as they sneak through the thickness of the sea. Not many of them reach this depth and even fewer land where Seul’s lying. He always wonders what it’s like to be up there, for once, bathing in every one of the lights ever cast by the sun. The thought comes to him in a quick moment, then drifts away within the underwater currents.