The deal was this: that I’d lose my mermaid’s voice, and gain human language. Determiner, adjective, noun, auxiliary, lexical verb. The welcoming buoyancy of the sea’s pulsing grandeur reduced to a linear gravity. Each phrase chained to another in a relentless syntax, like knives piercing the sole of each fresh footstep.

An airy wasteland, this world, where meaning is lost in the wind, and everyone shouts to be heard. Whatever yearning once delivered me to this shore has long since receded with the tide.