Danley Romero

Destination Wedding

Before my mother died she told me mermaids were real. We were staring at the ocean and she said if I’d hold my ear against a seashell, I would hear them breathing. The shell was tiny and round and a line in the center curled and rose into the smallest mountain I’d ever seen. If I pressed hard with my thumb, I thought it might break and fall apart.

The crows watched me place a shell on my mother’s grave a week before my wedding. I have found shells in crows’ nests, which seems to mean the ocean is everywhere and nowhere at once, that it doesn’t have a home, or that its home is wherever it is brought by any force that can carry a piece of it. A puddle of gasoline in the parking lot reminded me that there is color, and that almost anything can go up in flames when it’s hot enough. Even parking lots. Water was flowing inside of me—I imagined it progressing forward in the hollow centers of my bones, or gushing slowly through spongy marrow. I wasn’t sure how many ways it could move around inside of me. I couldn’t feel much.

The day before my wedding there was a moment when I thought my continence was giving out. I imagined opening up like a badly ruptured street, sewage spewing in spurts and streams into the air and a general state of panic. “Tomorrow will be awful,” I told my husband-to-be, Jackson, who thought I said this because some of my family were still homophobic, maybe always would be. How could I know? I just didn’t want to break in front of everyone. I didn’t want them to think, This checks out, that he’d fall apart like this and come spewing out all over us, all over the world around us, all over our sensibilities. He exists this way inside himself. Wretched man. I hate upsetting anyone.

I took a breath and decided I’d ask Jackson at midnight if he would walk with me to the ocean, but when midnight came and I opened my eyes he was sleeping. I swam alone and was fine. My continence was fine. I started thinking it might have all been because I was so tired, or a little nervous for tomorrow, or maybe I caught a bug and it passed in record time, I slept it off that quickly. I congratulated myself and then sank and opened my mouth for saltwater and maybe a fish to rush in, but there were no fish and the waves just rocked me gently. The waves, the wind—I listened to them that night, accompanied by the rhythms in the foreground: my footsteps when I walked watching the moon on the water, the pulse in my ears, sometimes ringing through my whole head.

My grandmother brought her best friend, who didn’t have an invitation, to the island and to the ceremony. This woman had curly hair that moved a lot and fell in the way of her eyes, sometimes down to her lips and into her mouth. The tips were pink, as if they’d been dyed that way, and it was as beautiful as it was flawed, but it was lipstick and unintentional, and then there was the blush in her hair, too. When the wind blew I was worried she’d fall over, or that so much of her would blow away in a fine powder that all that would be left would be a skeleton, or not even that, just drops of water, hovering in place slightly apart from each other.

She said, “It’s so sorry for you, you’re handsome!” She grabbed my hand. “Are you lonely?” She lives on the side of a mountain and has all her life. In her parents’ home (they are dead, buried in the side of a different mountain) she taught herself to read stories forward and then backward, and then to burn the books and never think of them again. Anytime she mentioned this, which she did, surprisingly, on several different occasions I had witnessed, it was with her chin high in the air, proud but also defensive about it. When she was younger she would hike up the mountain and then roll back down a ways. Hike up, roll down. Sometimes for hours. People thought someone was beating her, she was so constantly cut and bruised. But it was just the path, the body, and forward momentum leaving injuries. And that’s how it is sometimes. Maybe even how it often is.

My grandmother joined her rolling, once, and told me about it. She said the mountain felt like it might simply stop existing beneath her, as her body rolled and each inch of her felt and then did not feel and then felt again the mountain, aching. It was unnerving. She said the ground hurt but at least there was ground, that she was more terrified of it opening up and swallowing her than anything else, in the moments when her arm went from being pinned beneath her chest to waving the sky goodbye to crashing down again, smack. Sometimes she catches herself walking lightly, not wanting to give too much of her weight to anything, ever. This is one of the few insights I had into my grandmother and the way her mind worked, which might be to say one of the few insights into her spirit, the core of her, her soul; though of course it might not be and it’s all confusing to me.

Are you lonely?

Her eyes, framed black by thick mascara and partly covered by the ringlets of her hair, were green, and I wanted to say, Yes.

“That’s why you won’t make children? You’re lonely?”

After, I looked at Belinda, who I knew was a friend of Jackson. I looked at her close-cropped dust of hair, sparkling gold in the sunlight, her scalp. A tattoo on her face was just a little star hanging there, weightless in her sky-skin. She had three scars near her wrist, a dangly earring that was a marble glued to a Cheeto glued to an acorn and another that was a toy ballerina glued to an acorn, and one of her fingernails was gone. It just wasn’t there.

I turned to my husband—my husband!—and felt low fires inside of my chest, burning big parts of me away, shedding them as ash and soot.

“What’s wrong?” he asked me.

“She means nothing to me,” I whispered. He wrapped an arm around my waist and held me against him. I felt him breathing. I knew he understood what I was telling him. That these people had histories that became a part of who we, me and Jackson, are, that people were not isolated things but liquid colors in a bucket that learn to blend together as they are sloshed around, that I would never see him fully because I did not know this woman, Belinda, with all of her stories and colors and the intersections of her and him, and this might be the only intersection between the three of us and if she ever dies—she appeared to be holy; I would not have doubted it if someone told me she would live forever and ever and outlive the worms inside the deadest, most ultimate animal, the one whose eyes some highest imaginable power would stare into, whispering that they were sorry, that it was never worth it and they were so sorry for the act of creation, that really everything was inevitable but they were sorry, anyway, but if she did die—I would maybe not even feel it, and they would be so thoroughly blended, Belinda and Jackson, that any chance to pull his colors apart and separate them from hers, to see Jackson as he is and Jackson as he is purely, without the added shades of Belinda or his mother or the woman who put an apple sauce on his plate in grade school, that opportunity would vanish as surely as if it had never existed. And maybe it never did exist, and she was just a gap between myself and Jackson, and that meant there were little gaps between us everywhere.

So he kept his arm around me a little while and it was a quiet pressure inside a loud, loud feeling that would dull, I knew, but maybe never fade away completely.

Later that night I was in the ocean again. Jackson had fallen asleep even though we were married now. How could he sleep? There was chocolate spread deep into the corners of his mouth. I wanted to suck it out but instead I went swimming.

For a second in the weird light in the water beneath the moon my eyebrows rose up high. I thought my arm was scaly. I might have heard my mother speaking into my ears but I wasn’t certain I remembered her voice. Her voice is a gap. “They step into water looking like you or me, and once they get wet—bam. Mermaid.” I remember her sipping her martini, wide-brimmed hat tipped over her square shades, but not the qualities of her voice, not the pitch and tone. “It’s really dramatic!” she said.

The next day most everyone was gone. His parents kissed us goodbye, my dad had already left, saying he needed to get back, not getting breakfast with us first, and the sun was burning, as it always burned, silently. A wind picked up and died down, then did it again.

“Can we stay here forever?” I asked Jackson, thinking about the island, the ocean, the everyone-is-gone of it now, in the aftermath of our ceremony. Or maybe I said, “Can this not change?” He put his arm around me, kissed the side of my head. He said, “You and me, you and me!” He was a hype man, almost by profession.

On the plane a week later I watched the water until we were inside a cloud, and then I watched the clouds. When we were coming out of them I looked at Jackson sleeping, and at our hands and arms. I imagined scales there. I could almost feel the way the waves must have felt the moonlight, all alone. I realized for years I had been hearing the moon asking too many questions, and no one was answering, not even I was—I might have been the most reluctant to answer, actually—and I opened up my mouth because it felt like there was cold air rushing into my face, like someone had opened the plane windows going this high, this fast. I wondered if I had ever been calm in my entire life. Inside my body molecules were breaking themselves over and over, and I was breaking them, and they were reforming, and I was rebuilding them, and I breathed out someone’s dead mother, but I could not ever breathe out mine. That would scatter me across the whole world and I would never find myself. And that must be how rainclouds feel, I thought, and then I watched the ocean below us through a patch of clear sky and everything was muted, all the colors, they were all so muted.

I looked at Jackson and thought, When he sleeps, he means it.

He really does.

Danley Romero is a writer and cellist living in Southwest Louisiana, and a recent graduate of the University of New Hampshire’s MFA writing program. He is interested in exploring queerness, surrealism, and musicality of thought and language through short forms. His work has appeared in the New Orleans Review and The Massachusetts Review.