The Girls Beneath the Harbour

Last summer, I went to the water because the city had too many mouths. Every street knew what happened. Every window looked too much like a witness. Every red light became a warning my body understood before I did. Harbourfront glittered as if grief had not entered the city and learned my name. Glass towers held the sun in their bright, indifferent hands. Tourists laughed with ice cream melting down their fingers. Streetcars rang their small silver bells. Somewhere, music rose from a speaker near the boardwalk. Somewhere, children chased gulls as if the world had not already proven how quickly a body can become a memory. I stood at the edge of Lake Ontario a lake large enough to pretend it was an inland sea, and tried to breathe. The lake was large enough to make the city look temporary. Large enough to swallow noise. Large enough to hold what I could not keep carrying through streets that kept turning ordinary without permission. I had learned by then that grief does not always arrive wearing black. Sometimes it arrives as exhaustion. As a locked jaw. As hands you keep washing though there is nothing there. The red my mind kept inventing between my fingers was not evidence. Only aftermath. Only the body trying to make guilt visible. Only memory mistaking itself for blood. The lake did not ask me to explain. It did not ask what I saw. It did not ask why I survived the knowing. It did not ask why some names become rooms you cannot enter without leaving part of yourself behind. The lake only moved. Blue shoulder after blue shoulder, carrying summer light away from shore. I wanted it to take everything. The image. The sirens. The silence after. The careful voices. The questions with no merciful answers. I wanted the water to reach inside me and loosen every memory from the walls. To sweep the city out of my chest. To leave me clean enough to walk home as someone who had not been haunted before dinner. But water is not mercy in the way we imagine. It does not erase. It keeps. That is the first thing the lake taught me. Beneath the harbour, beneath the blue my grief made endless, I imagined them. Not monsters. Not miracles. Not the pretty kind painted on souvenir cups, all jeweled tails and harmless smiles. Girls. Women. Names the city tried to drop into the dark. Grief given fins. Memory taught how to breathe under pressure. They lived beneath the boats, beneath the ferries, beneath the white wake tourists photographed without knowing what the water was carrying. Some had hair tangled with lakeweed. Some wore pearls that looked too much like tears. Some had mouths full of songs they no longer offered to the living. Some had hands like mine— open, empty, accused by nothing except memory. They did not sing to lure men to their deaths. That is a story the shore invented to explain why drowning always sounds like a woman’s fault. No. They sang because silence had been mistaken for peace too many times. They sang because the dead should not have to beg to be remembered. They sang because somewhere above them, the city kept walking over its own ghosts and calling it a normal day. I wondered if my friend had heard them. Not as rescue. Not as return. Only as witness. A chorus beneath the blue, saying: you were here. you were loved. you were not only what happened at the end. The lake darkened. The sun lowered itself between buildings like a coin pressed into a closed palm. For a moment, the water looked less like a surface and more like a door. I thought about stepping through. Not dying. No. Only disappearing from the version of the city that knew too much. Only becoming something with gills. Something no one could ask to explain its grief clearly. Something beautiful because it had survived what pressure was meant to destroy. I wanted to be one of the girls beneath the harbour. Not harmless. Not healed. Not innocent. Just changed enough that the world would stop expecting my lungs to work the same way. But the mermaids did not call me down. They rose instead in the language of waves. One after another, they broke against the rocks and returned. Broke and returned. Broke and returned. As if survival was not a grand thing. As if it was only this: to be struck, to scatter, to gather yourself back into motion. I stayed until the sky turned bruised and gold. Until the city lights opened their eyes. Until the harbour became a bowl of trembling stars. I could still feel the ghosts waiting for me beyond the water. In the streets. In the stations. In every place where memory had learned to stand quietly beside my shoulder. The lake had not taken them. Not completely. But it had held them long enough for me to unclench my hands. Long enough for the imagined blood to become only skin again. Long enough for breathing to feel less like betrayal. Before I left, I looked down at the dark water and thanked the girls beneath the harbour. For not being gentle in the way people demand from survivors. For keeping what the city could not bear to name. For proving that depth is not the same thing as disappearance. That drowning is not the only story water knows how to tell. That somewhere beneath every blue surface, there is a chorus of unfinished lives refusing to become silence. And maybe that is what mermaids are. Not fantasy. Not warning. Not beautiful because they are safe. Beautiful because they learned how to live where the world sent them to vanish.