Embryonic Knowing 

Something in me remembers being born of salt, an embryonic knowing that the deep waters are steeped within my blood, that I am most likely of mermaid lineage, incarnated into this human flesh to infuse oceanic intelligence throughout each layer of density.

As a child from the Belgian countryside, I yearned to be near water, dreams of crystal clear streams or the great seas filled my imagination. In reality I had only access to murky ponds and the swimming pool of my best friend, Sarah, which I consider the savior of my heated childhood. The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen was the story I read feverishly during those years. On most nights, I would bring the book to sleep with me. And in the moment of turning the final page as she transforms into sea foam, my heart would jump into my throat. The Little Mermaid traded her fish tail and tongue, her song of the sea, for legs to meet the prince she had given her heart. She gave up her voice to be understood by a world that never truly saw her. When at the end, she is given the choice to save herself at his expense, she refused. So instead she dissolved and turned into sea foam.

I knew, to remember, I needed to be near water. I knew that each time I sank below the liquid surface, my body would retrieve a hidden code. I trained an entire summer to hold my breath long enough to meet the ancestors of the deep, the shark beings. Entering their energetic field, I unlocked a memory which activated the original fear of non-belonging to either world. To heal, I understood, I must surrender — be swept by the prism of a million truths until the ancient essence would take its seat. Meeting this deepest of mirrors, I dove blindly into my unconscious. This was the true beginning of the encounter with my inner waters, and of course, it was through the streaming of my plasmic tears that I began to admit I had forgotten too.

This forgetting has moved through our species for thousands of years, and what we call remembering is not something we do alone. These waters carry memory, sea to sea, womb to womb, until what begins to surface in one of us, stirs in us all. What I am slowly retrieving, after diving further within, is not an answer, but my voice — wet, newly born, learning to speak its embryonic language of love again.