Ton of feathers, ton of steel.

I've always been enamoured of selkie stories. You know them: a fisherman finds a woman far too beautiful for him weeping on the shore. Through some kindness he wins her and they manage to marry, but she keeps a box under their bed that she requires he never open, and she never stops looking to the sea. It's after they have children that he breaks. She barely sees him when the ocean roars within reach. He never admits that he always thought the sea would be his, that the shore and the loneliness would belong to his wife. Some stories live in humans. They are born with us, sure as bones and blood.

Despite having lived with a partner for a number of years, there were certain objects that were distinctly his, that felt eternally foreign. I never knew where to put them when I straightened up. My beautiful roommate has a collection of small treasures and trinkets on her windowsill and the bookshelf beneath it. That I know her to be a witch, that I know something of the work that she does with these shrines and bones and icons does not actually make them more strange than they would be otherwise. While I always believed it theoretically, it was experiencing a solidly and unnecessarily awful break-up that shattered any illusions I ever could have had regarding objectivity. We each misread the other so completely. We fought the hurt we thought we saw, launching campaigns in different wars on different continents and in different centuries. Some philosophers have dubbed the inescapable nature of the subjective a vast and endless loneliness. That my life would seem to be completely mine, always my own responsibility, is not something I find to be all that distressing.

So. You're living with a woman who might be a mermaid. Your partner stubbornly insists upon having a past you can never witness. They continue to exist when you close your eyes. You believe that you only want to see her more clearly, and you call your invasion love.

(Some god places you in a garden. He created you and everything you know but exists outside of both. The only hope you have of gnosis is to take strange drugs, to eat perilous fruit. Understanding can only come in expulsion.)

You look in the box beneath the bed. In it is a seal skin, and before you can make sense of it your wife is wearing it and crawling to the shore, diving once more into a place you can never go. You float upon its surface as you always did. You lower hooks and line and bring to shore what you can. You wonder if the seals that rest on buoys, which hunt and fight in the waves, are really narrowing their eyes at you. You wonder if they gossip, and about what.

In another variant the fisherman knows his wife to be something otherworldly. He steals her skin in order to keep her, and she cannot escape until he reveals the place in which he's hidden it by looking at it again. This resonates with me less than once it did. We're all adults here. No one can keep us if we don't wish to be kept.