Chlorine Jade Song Quotes

A classic trait of girlhood - forever confusing your desires with that of an older man's.

Nearly every human memory is corrupted by the fact that it is a memory of being human

I guess hearts are slippery because they’re covered in blood. I wish I could bleed mine dry. Then I’d miss you less.

Humans and monsters both understand stories about magic and marvel and myth are made interesting by their stemming from trauma and violence and blood. How can one grow without pain?

On the day of my first period, I was more dead doe than human woman. Was womanhood always so violent, raw?

Humans are the downfall to myths. Whether the human razed the home, broke the heart, or betrayed the trust, the mythical is always in a worse state after the introduction.

I never said yes, but I never said no, and the indefinite limbo of maybe is where regret and doubt and confusion reside as neighbors, forever reduced to the monotony of a clouded memory, the mind traveling in never-ending cul-de-sac circles.

Beautiful things demand touch. Hence the taped floors at art museums and the roped boundaries between paparazzi and celebrities on red carpets.

Do you understand the world I lived in? How my mutilations were a gift?

Mermaids were beautiful, and was I not also beautiful? Alluring? A creature of the water? Not of salt like the mermaids in the book, but of chlorine.

How was I supposed to differentiate between the pain due to the concussion and the pain due to the agony of everyday human life?

I judged her days as remarkable for their mediocrity.

Grudges are for humans too small for forgiveness.

He was a winner who did not understand how to lose, the most dangerous kind.

They were both heavier than I remembered, as if their sadness had materialized into solid weights onto their shoulders, but it is true that what humans call intergenerational trauma has always been heavy, sinking to the gloomy abyss of repressed memory to be mined for so-called wisdom later. I was newly aware my parents were people who carried their burdens on their bodies rather than within themselves—this was my doomed inheritance.

As a mermaid, I now recognize how winning places the self within a construct of hierarchy over other bodies—a false construct. There’s no victory when someone else loses. But back then, oh, how I adored winning. The rush of it all! You poor humans. You’ll never learn to be better, not when winning is so addictive.

My heart screamed in capital letters.

What is it called when immigrants reverse, when they wake up from the nightmare masked as a dream?

And like blue eyes and whiteness, eventually I learned the Blue Eyes White Dragon was simply a construct too. A piece of flimsy card stock, its value ascribed by a mysterious higher power. I could go online and buy a million Blue Eyes White Dragon cards, and similarly, I could walk down the street of our suburb and see blue-eyed white girls everywhere, available a dime a dozen.

My period continued, an inevitable cycle, yet every month I was somehow surprised by the violent pain. It was as if I refused to believe my body, something I’d trusted for years, would repeatedly betray me. My stomach ate itself from the inside, a revelry I had been dragged to, a feast I was forced to join though I was not hungry. The meal lasted four to six days, gorging on cramps, the spilled crumbs falling out of me stained with raspberry jam. My stomach was never a clean eater, gnawing on my uterus and fallopian tubes, leaving bite marks. I counted each rotation of the sun with heightening anxiety until it passed and I reset the clock. The knife carved my insides into pot roasts; the fork jabbed my sides into holey cheese. I could distinguish each fork prong—the pain was profound. My guts twisted around the spoon like spaghetti, tangled noodles slathered in scarlet marinara. Menstruation was more smashed acidic tomatoes than sweet fruit compote. I wiped my fingers on white jeans made of napkins and left streaks dried to rust. The stains came out with bleach and detergent. I died and regenerated every month. How else could I define the experience? The reasonable explanation was death. I decided when my body was wheeled into the morgue, the coroner would declare I died of being a woman. Which was far better than dying of being a man.

How selfish I was. But I was meant to be selfish—my self, meeting the fish.

In a way, my breaking compounded my ascendancy, though it was never I who did the actual breaking. It was my head, the people, and the systems around me. As a human, I was weak. I allowed myself to crack. Today, as a mermaid, I am strong. Unbreakable. You cannot touch me,

If it hurts, then no," I murmured, my voice muffled by the closeness of our bodies. "I can't handle more pain.

it is true that what humans call intergenerational trauma has always been heavy, sinking to the gloomy abyss of repressed memory to be mined for so-called wisdom later.

Humans break so easily. They break their bones, their bodies, their hearts. I, too, as a girl, once broke. My head. And when this happened, I, like many other humans, did not allow myself the time and resources to fully rest, heal, recover. Of Course, there are excuses: No health insurance. Boss wants me back in the office tomorrow. You must pay for the ambulance. I'm out of sick days. No paid maternity leave. Need to get back to swim practice. There are, essentially, human excuses, but more specifically, American excuses. I'm confined to a comprehension of human difficulties through an American lens, no matter how hard I try to break out of the star-spangled brainwashing I was subject to from a young girl's age. In a way, the recognition that these issues are uniquely American makes it worse, because they are entirely avoidable.

I could see [my mother] through the walls of the doctor's office--she'd be clutching a Tupperware of sliced fruit as a surprise and consolation for the loss of my birth-control virginity as she sat in the waiting room on a broken vinyl chair, magazine covers showing glamorous white movie stars with hair-sprayed ponytails stacked next to her, American soap operas depicting fake amnesia on the television screen above--for them, amnesia was a plot point, and for me, amnesia was a method of tolerance, a method for getting through every headache, through every medical procedure, through each doctor's office visit.

Ravenous hunger, wanton sexuality, and the consequences thereof--how exhausting to be constrained by mortal biology.

Would a mermaid who stays at home, much-loved, with two beautiful parents and loving sisters who share everything, be worth memorializing? No.

I anticipated what was coming. I had done it enough with Brad and Ess. I would do it with Cathy. I'd allow myself one more human mistake.

My stomach ate itself from the inside, a revelry I had been dragged to, a feast I was forced to join though I was not hungry. The meal lasted four to six days, gorging on cramps, the spilled crumbs falling out of me stained with raspberry jam. My stomach was never a clean eater, gnawing on my uterus and fallopian tubes, leaving bite marks.

The home was a hard place to love, perhaps because it was the home, and you therefore expected so much more from it, and felt its failures more acutely.

Please understand what I did was out of aching loneliness—the only reason people ever do anything.

She never came to my swim meets because she cared too much. My disappointment was hers if I swam badly, and my high was hers if I won,

My uterus sensed the upcoming meet was important, and so, like most needy children, it announced itself at the most inopportune of times.

Ess owned a body more a vehicle for their own pleasure rather than a body carrying scars on its surface. From them, I learned I could seize my body back from those who sought to destroy it.

How many times would Cathy be waiting for me outside a bathroom stall door as I struggled with Penelope’s issues?

Nearly every human memory is corrupted by the fact that it is a memory of being human.

No love existed as strongly as that of a coach for his athlete.

Menstruation was more smashed acidic tomatoes than sweet fruit compote. I wiped my fingers on white jeans made of napkins and left streaks dried to rust. The stains came out with bleach and detergent. I died and regenerated every month. How else could I define the experience? The reasonable explanation was death. I decided when my body was wheeled into the morgue, the coroner would declare I died of being a woman. Which was far better than dying of being a man.

On the outside, my body consumed and performed what was expected of me. Inside, my brain conspired, its mermaid mechanisms hidden in my skull, fighting headache demons while planning a future escape from my human body. My loved ones did not suspect anything. They saw what they wanted to see. Humans, ever foolish.

These moments after practice, in the dark, alone, were sacred and divine. Though I believed in neither God nor organized religion nor Jesus, I imagined I was in church, experiencing my own sort of baptism. I'd pray to the Pool Gods and Poseidon as I reclined on the lane rope, my body half-submerged, inhaling the embrace of chlorine like it was the last drop of water left in the oasis before I died parched in the desert. I'd float alone in the dark, silent pool for hours until the school janitor entered and yelled at me to go home.

My convulsions and goose bumps were eager signs of the impending regionals meet. My Hamlet speech had flopped, but I didn't care. I was queen of my own infinite space.

Star athletes had to be delusional enough to think they could withstand physics and gravity enough to fly up onto the first-place podium and shine with the sheer force of athletic ability; there was nothing more bold than a star, after all, visible with the human naked eye despite its death eons ago.

I didn't want to read his note. Every pen stroke of his, whether it was crossing the t's or dotting the i's, slashed my heart with both ferocious anger and wretched, unwanted affection for the diabolical man who had controlled so much of my human fate.

My mouth swished around fallacies like soda, the rottenness decaying my teeth.