Published at 22/03/2025 17:19
Created at 14/01/2025
370 words - 1.85 min of reading time
Once there was a girl made of water. Skin, the mundane wrapper that contains creatures like you and me, did not encase her. Her waters were clear and pristine, yet as she grew, strange sensations toward life's phenomena began to spring within her, though she remained translucent.
Rain was invigorating, certainly, but internal whirlpools and waves stirred inside her, and she saw others around her: they were not her kin, they were clouded. Some hardly resembled water at all, dense and solid in their convictions, and paradoxically impermeable.
One day, she felt extraordinarily strange: a spasm, a sudden nausea. She began to retch, and onto the floor fell a living fish, flapping about. In that moment she felt relief, but as nothing lasts forever, soon enough, in the days that followed, she began vomiting more and more fish of various types and sizes.
At times they were swordfish, when someone confronted her. At others they were clownfish, when she was amused. And sometimes, they were lanternfish, when she faced severe problems in her relationships.
And the other people, who were also diverse waters, found her case most peculiar; they had never vomited any fish, and those who had fish kept them deep within themselves, where they could remain alive. Stagnant waters, violent torrents, swamps, brackish or fresh waters: none, not one of them understood her.
Dissatisfied with her condition, she, now a grown young woman, sought an answer.
She tried poisoning herself to kill the fish, but this only caused her to cough up dead, foul-smelling fish.
She tried freezing and boiling herself, but enduring these self-inflicted tortures only made her vomit the most aggressive fish when she returned to her senses.
She tried to find any other cure; however, her case was unknown in medical literature.
That's when she finally understood: there was no cure because there was no disease. She existed as a limited aquarium, like an ocean trapped in a glass of water.
After much suffering, she at last glimpsed the solution. There was only one who would understand her, and of which she could become a part of: She then threw herself into the sea, disappeared completely into the vastness, now happy, alone, and totally free.
