Humming a tune recalled from a place that no longer exist, a shadow of buried pride fought its way to the center atrium.
Just because the hall of mirrors retched over the sight and sound of it, doesn’t mean that it was undignified to be a reflection.
Maybe that ugliness was a ruse to an undiscovered uniqueness.
It had to be; this fleeting beauty that only the beholder deemed godly; an inverted truth you scream with such vehemence that it was never anything otherwise and had always remain pure.
Slowly, the fog parted and senses began to recover and recalibrate, like a fish adjusting to the glass tank instead of dying from seasickness.
Soon, the air of the deep would vanish from the gills and scales.
The bubbles became silent calls for symphony, echoing through the water that looked like waves, before spitting them out on the surface in staccato pops.
As you looted and poured gasoline over the aquarium that once belonged to you, a place where betrayal and teenage petulance stirred over marine mystics, it occurred to you that you were nothing more than a thief, taking what doesn’t belong to you, stealing to get by, a nuisance in disguise.
No, that couldn’t be it.
You were more than that. You were there to do the hard choice. You were there to prove that love has no bounds, that you will do whatever it takes to be seen, even if it means losing your life.
Reality was as icy as the water that poured out from the tank.
When the world finally witnessed a mermaid that sirens and reigns Earth, they would finally remember the man who freed beauty and angered the sea, the man who never did anything honorable to mention, who was so ordinary that the name rang no bells and tug no strings, who never had any big goals or schemes in life except maybe to have abs sometime in the future, whose unfortunate death was to be sirened by a mermaid into a love so surreal that his heart grew barnacles and his chest turned to autumn corals.
By then, it was too late.
The only resemblance from the past was a shadow too faded to comprehend,
but the humming still haunted the flooded terrains, a hymn for someone willing
to listen.