ORIGINS: Look at the prop of the third mouse in the original series. There is a skull painted on her face, and the rest looked like the tail of a whale, ready to dive into the darkest depths of the ocean.
What do you think lies at the bottom of the sea? There was a time when I thought that the answer was treasure chests. But now I know that it can only be old bones. Like most children, at first I tried using my heart to see in the dark. I was determined to find gold, a thousand stars to fill my chest until it burst with wonder, with joy and warmth. But I couldn’t beat the cold, and before I knew it something ate my flesh away, leaving my bones exposed. And now I feel old. Old beyond my years. Because I know that darkness never buried the treasures people left behind for others to find. Darkness is what people leave behind. That cold darkness, that’s full of salt and slowly eats the stars, and the children that go looking for them, away. And if I were a mermaid like you, if I had the tail of a whale, I wouldn’t try to splash a few drops of starlight onto the night. I would just try to get as much salt out of my hair as I could. Trust me. There is nothing worse than inheriting the ugliness others have seen.
I know how you feel. The lessons you have been taught, they are like barnacles, aren’t they? On your whale tail, pressuring you, propelling you towards a future you have no say in. But it’s worse, so much worse, when they are on your hair, isn’t it? When you start believing. When they have covered everything, and you can no longer find your own words. You want them gone. You try to shake them off before it’s too late. But it doesn’t work. No matter how many times you slap your tail, those barnacles stay where they are, and after every splash, it feels like you are the only one that disappears. Like foam. So much of you. In your wake. So very far away from you. Where you can’t even pretend, for a few seconds, that getting it back would be possible. And I don’t know if this will bring you any comfort, but there is always a bright side. One day those barnacles will replace your bones, and the pressure will be gone. You will see the world through a pair of rose-colored barnacles, and you will learn to love that future, others have built, word by word, for you.
I would pity you, but you are a mermaid, and I am not. When the darkness becomes too much, when you feel like you are drowning in it and you are about to lose what little is left of your hope, you can break the surface and replenish your lungs. You can tilt your head back and look at the stars. Until you lose yourself in their light so completely that the darkness can’t reach you, because you don’t leave even a crumb of doubt in your wake. The hope you regain is that bright. And if it were mine, my lungs wouldn’t know what fear is, because they would know, just like I do, that I would always find my way back to the stars. But I am not a mermaid like you. On one side of my horizon is the ground beneath my feet and on the other is the sky above my head, but there is nowhere I can hide to try and hold on to my hope. Because there are already bones buried in the ground, and when I gaze at the stars, when the desperation in my lungs makes me stare at the sun, I always find myself back in that darkness I was trying to leave behind. A thousand black spots push me back. And they keep pushing, until they fill my bones with doubts. So, maybe you are the one that should be pitying me.
What reason could you possibly have to be sad on such a bright day? I know that you are a mermaid, I know that on the day you die, your corpse will start to sink to the bottom of the sea, and you think that you deserve better than that. But we almost never get what we deserve. I can see that you are about to break into to tears, because one day your corpse will break into snow. I will just rot away, but someone coined the term marine snow to describe what will happen to you. Poor thing. Snow is white, it sparkles in the light, and you were led to believe that you would shine brighter than the stars. I understand. Believe me, I do. No one wants to be forgotten, that’s why some of us cling to our bones longer than others. But wishing for a pair of legs isn’t the solution. You shouldn’t pin your hopes on the wind. Because even if you were to turn into dust, right above me, the wind would never carry you to the stars. Darkness is what awaits all of us. That’s why you should delight in bright days such as this one.
If you ask me, we were given darkness so that we could bury treasures in it. Someone wanted us to have beautiful memories. Someone wanted to spare us the disappointment of having to watch everything that makes this life worth living rot away before our eyes. We could have remembered the brightest stars. Ones that didn’t twinkle, that never wavered, until they disappeared in a twirl of foam. But we took that beautiful gift and buried our bones in it. And who knows, maybe yours aren’t like mine. Maybe your bones can still sing a beautiful song, that doesn’t sound like a lie whose magic stopped working a long time ago. Maybe you will take something other than ugliness to your grave. But my first impression of this life were the stars, and I won’t let this ugliness that is now carved on my bones be the last. When the time comes, I will throw myself into the sea. I will look for treasure in the darkest part of the sea, where all the whales are buried. And I will let their songs be my lullaby.
When I was young, when I felt lost, I used to look up at the night sky. I remember hearing somewhere that all the answers were there. For the taking. And since I needed hope more than I needed my next breath, that’s what I did. I took what I needed to hear. There was a lot of black and a scattering of white. I knew that my bones were white, and I didn’t mind turning to dust. Not if it meant that all the ugliness attached to my bones would rot, and my light would finally be free to float. But by the time I grew up, only one star was left in the sky. There weren’t even tears left in my eyes, and I had to let go of the answer that had been giving me hope. Colors bleed into one another, and black and white are no exception to the rule. Now that I am too old to believe in angels, I have to learn to live with the knowledge that there are only grey whales in this sea of tears we call home.
You want me to tell you what made me grow up? Why? The child that I used to be is dead and buried. Crying won’t bring him back, but if you want to put flowers on his grave I can tell you where it is. Do you see that dark sea over there, where young whales keep adding scars to their faces to match those of older whales? You can throw your flowers right there. Into that hopelessly dark sea, where whales don’t learn from past mistakes. Disappointment is what makes children grow up. And I remember mine as clear as day. Word for word. We don’t learn from someone else’s mistakes. We have to make our own. Seeing someone else’s scars isn’t enough. We have to bleed, and feel it in our flesh, in our very bones. What are you waiting for? Throw your flowers. Don’t you want to know what made me grow up? It was the sudden realization that the sea wouldn’t be so dark, darker than dried blood, if people at least learned from their own mistakes. But that would take willingness, and apparently that’s too much to ask.
I heard somewhere that some parents bury treasures in their children’s hearts. Little lessons, meant to brighten their life. I used to wonder if having one of those treasures buried in my heart would make my pulse sound like a whale song. I loved the idea of growing up with a beautiful song shaping me from within, and one day unearthing that treasure to put in my own two shiny cents, before burying it in my child’s heart. But I had been picturing the wrong type of whale all along. One day, my parents told me that coins weren’t stars, that they weren’t meant to brighten anything. They told me that they would teach me to make the best of my life, because whales like us, we smile. We let others see what they want to see. That was my lesson. And eventually I learned to smile. After I accepted that that’s what all lessons are. Something that breaks children’s hearts.
I never asked for anything. Why waste my breath, when I knew, in the bottom of my heart, that Death would never grant me my deepest wish? I would have settled for being able to wave goodbye to you. A slap of a whale’s tail. A splash of white. I didn’t want you to remember my selfish tears, only the starlight you put in my eyes. The wonder and the beauty you brought back to my life, when you cleared every ugly word off my heart. I wanted to give that gift back to you. My love. Only my love. And not even a single drop of my loss. Because I knew the sound those tears would make, when they started trickling down my face. The haunting whale song they would sing. And I never wanted to see you off like that. With my loss weighing you down. Keeping you from reaching the stars.
I hate goodbyes. They taste like a broken promise. Where is my oblivion? White should be the color of nothingness, not the color of ghosts. It should be foam in the wake of a whale, not barnacles on its tail. This was supposed to be where we parted ways. Goodbye. Have a nice afterlife. Getting those words out of my lungs should have dragged all the memories of you out of my heart. It should have been enough to dry up the sea and sever our connection for good. But I can feel it rising. I can hear my tears threatening to run after you. My eyes are burning. And I hate you.
I don’t know what you want me to say. Do you expect me to apologize? Is that it? Goodbyes will never mean to me what they mean to you, and I am sorry if I ever misled you, but my heart just isn’t built that way. I loved you. But I take everything in this life one day at a time. I don’t look back. There is a reason I swim in the sea, where waves break and foam disappears without a trace. It’s not my fault if you are one of those whales that use scars to keep time. You loved me too. And now you don’t. It’s as simple as that. If your heart needs scars to know for sure whether what we had was love or not, that’s on you.
There are some things that you should never ask of somebody that loves you. I have always believed that smiling after a goodbye, when those words are barely out of their mouth, is one of them. But that’s what you asked of me. I would have done anything for you. I said goodbye to you with dry eyes, didn’t I? My voice didn’t break, it didn’t even show a tint of tears. No. I smiled. For you. I held that smile in place, until you breathed your last breath and darkness fell over my world. I should have been allowed to mourn you then. I should have been allowed to take my time to say goodbye, like I needed to say it. With tears, and memories, and every ounce of love that still lived in the pieces of my broken heart. I should have been allowed to sing in the depths, until the weight of that homeless whale lifted off my chest and I could breathe again. But you told me to hold onto that smile. And I loved you, so that’s what I did. I smiled. Without taking the deep breath I needed to take, for fear of losing that smile in the dark and never getting it back. From that whale that to this day still cries in my heart.
Look what I managed to save from the crabs. It’s such a lovely skull, wouldn’t you say? It shows so much potential. Doesn’t it make you wish you could bring it back to life? Under a different name, of course. Under a different flesh, now that the crabs have done away with everything the outside world touched and condemned to rot. You wouldn’t let that happen a second time, would you? You are a bubble of love in this sea of tears. You need to prove that you can keep someone safe. Before you burst and your love bleeds out. Before red washes out, and pink dissolves without a trace. Isn’t that so? Luckily for you, it just so happens that I am a whale. I can gift-wrap this skull in bubbles for you. If you open your heart, it will be all yours. I won’t even fill it with any of my songs. I will let you choose the words that will shape its mind. Because it wouldn’t be a gift otherwise, would it?
Sometimes I wish I were a crab. I wish I fed on ghosts and I knew what they taste like. Maybe it’s because I am too young and my bones still have a ways to grow, but I don’t have any regrets. No ghosts haunting me, stopping me dead in my tracks, and whispering cold words in my heart. Look back. Turn around. Run back home. I am a whale without a song. What I have are barnacles on my tail. Biting words, telling me to move on. To a different part of the sea, because none of the places I have been to taste right. There is always something missing. A hundred, a dozen, just one more grain of salt, that would make me finally feel alive. I hate those barnacles. If I could, I would have fed them to the crabs a long time ago. They remind me of a mermaid that dreamed about falling in love, and, still half-asleep, started singing to try and make that love a reality. It feels like those barnacles only know how to leave bones in their wake. And I can’t wait. For the day I finally feel something for one of those bones. I can’t wait. For the day I finally look back, and those barnacles no longer have a say in where my home should be.
One day I will be just another pile of bones in a whale graveyard. You will cry, you will miss me, and I already can’t wait for that sea to dry up. You will bury my bones in your memories of me, because that is what water does. It remembers. And that is how hearts work. They rewrite. And I, on behalf of my ghost, can’t wait to be free of you. I can’t wait for the wind to carry my whale song far, far away from you. But I am not completely heartless. As a parting gift, I will let you keep those bones. Every toy needs its clockwork, and memories are no different. So, don’t forget to wind them up, from time to time, if you want to keep listening to that song. The one you built in your heart for me, and never came out of my mouth.
I don’t know what love is, but I saw a mermaid once. I think that she must have loved someone from the bottom of her heart, and losing him dredged it, because she was shrouded in darkness when I saw her slumped on the sea floor. Boneless. That’s the word I would use to describe her. It was as if he had taken all her bones, and not just broken her heart, when he died. And if that is love, I would rather not have anything to do with it. I am a whale. I was born to sing in the darkest seas. Loneliness has already broken my heart a time or two. But it has never tried to claim my bones. And I just think that I will keep choosing it from now on.
Here’s the thing. Fish like us, we have short memory spans. We can’t cling to the sweetness of brighter days, when there is all this salt floating around. The Cold, the Dark, they keep burying the little happiness we manage to scrape together. One, two, three heartbeats, and then it’s just gone. But you are a whale. You have never felt overwhelmed a day in your life. Sure, the sea may be bigger than you and you may lose one or two songs to the Silence, but you can sing for hours on end. Whereas fish like us, we can’t even keep track of how many grains of sugar have slipped out of our tongues. And it won’t be long before we just give up trying to scrape any more happiness together.
It’s not fair. I am a fish. You are a whale. Of the two of us, I should be the one that felt at home in the sea. Happy. Comfortable. Welcome. That’s the word I am looking for. But there is no song inside me. I breathe, and breathe, and I keep breathing. I have already drunk more than half of the sea. I have opened my mouth more than a hundred times, but there is no song in my heart. To the sea, it’s as if I wasn’t even here. But I have heard your songs. I have heard them in the heart of the sea. And it’s not fair. Because you have lungfuls of air inside you. Air that doesn’t have the sea’s name written in it, even if it tastes of salt. Is it because I am small? Is it because I am just one? It’s not fair. I don’t want to have to join that school of fish over there. The sea should love me for who I am. You are alone and happy. And I want to be those things too.
Look! Shiny fish! Open your mouth, my son. Show your teeth. Make them swim faster. Faster. Faster! Until they leave a trail of silvery scales in their wake, and you can make a wish. I can’t do anything about your scars, heartbreak is part of life. But I can give you a little bit of magic to take the sting out. And let you forget, while there is blood on your tongue that tastes like shooting stars, that we live in such a salty sea.
Don’t forget to smile, my son. Do you see those fish over there? Those flashes are your cue. Smile. Smile. Smile. Tell yourself that you are happy. That you don’t need a song in your heart. Soon there will be fish in your mouth, and that should be more than enough for you. Smile, my son, and don’t ask for anything more. Because it doesn’t take much to break a heart, and Life, just like this sea, loves nothing more than to rub salt in the wounds.
Which of the thoughts you have swimming in your mind is slowly killing you?
This isn’t what I was promised. I was a child. I did what I was told. Now I am a grown-up. Where is the freedom that should have been my reward? I don’t feel free. Not even the slightest bit.
I want my magic back. I want to go back to being an oblivious child. This grown-up world only brings tears to my eyes. I keep hearing that things aren’t black and white. That grown-ups live in shades of grey. But the world never looked this dark to my childish eyes.
Be happy. Be happy. Be happy. Be happy! BE HAPPY! How? Just how am I supposed to accomplish that? I watched the things that would have made me happy become extinct, one by one, before my very eyes. By the time I grew up only those screams remained. Those hateful, half-hearted screams. Why not just tell me what to settle for, before I had a chance to really get to know my own heart?
This is it. The real beginning of my life. I should be smiling, shouldn’t I? But why is it that I can’t even seem to cry? Newborns do that, don’t they? They may not like what they see, but at least they show fighting spirit. They try. They hope for the best. But I seem to have run out of words. There is only silence left in my breath, and all I taste is hopelessness.