The rhythm of the music swam through the air, like goldfish. When it touched her ears she became a mermaid, moved and solitary in an ocean of sound.

Guys, is this okay for a story opening?

            In a city composed of tall, pretty buildings, painted in colours found in children’s books, there existed no pavements. Bright waters decorated in sunlight ran through the body of the city like blood does through the body. Canals gave life to the city and let it breathe out a population as vibrant as its architecture. The citizens travelled by boat. If they were too poor, they swam. If they were charming, stray dolphins let them ride on their backs. If radiant, swans would pull their raft. Each waterway was like an aquatic parade.
            

His lover lay down, smoking a cigarette and dotting the thick, sultry air with smoke rings.
Smiling, he said ‘You are so sweet, to give fallen angels back their halos.’

She was a mermaid born from canal waters. Hair decorated with shards of glass, glittering in the morning sun like tiny green stars. And words filthy like the water she made her home.

She was like a porcelain gun. One shot would shatter her. But not without taking out everyone around her, with the flying shards of her body.

I walked through a forest, the high sun turned the leaves into Peridots fit for the hands of a Queen. Along the path I saw a doe with bright bronze fur blazing in the heat, and diamond hooves that tread the ground so lightly the grass did not bend in her breeze-soft steps.

I stroked her head and she let me pass.

I came across a lagoon, deep blue like a summer sky prayed for by lovers, and as clear as a baby’s laugh. I dipped my bare foot in and watched silver rimmed ripples dance with each other. The surface was a fairy tale ball. My legs became fins the deeper I submerged in the water’s embrace, and I swam across in the diamond-coloured scaled that the lagoon gifted me.

I found a citron that scented the air with zest, tickling my lungs with bladed waves. I peeled it open to find a small ruby heart, beating the faintest of beats in the meadow of my palm. On the skin of the fruit was a message ‘Live in courage and grace. Your heart is a heart that will not turn sour, little one.’

My mother gave me a face that invites being told that I am loved, often. This is usually said by the people that make these claims. But is it love? Is it merely liked very much, but not cared for?

I understand that love is not a universal thought. Love is a religion with a millenia’s worth of denominations. Cults believe it to be an embrace of star coloured angels. Other sects consider it to be a healing spring you don’t have to pay five star prices to wash in. Prophets condemn it as a weapon that uses bodies as bullets.

I am not sure. I have only been loved in the safest possible ways. Where you can afford the price to be sincere because it is not high, nor are you betting it on the roulette wheel of a heart.

I have been loved like sitting in two arm chairs, side by side, instead of a loveseat with knees touching.

I have been loved like sharing a milkshake with two straws instead of one.

I have been loved like smelling a flower and not knowing the intimate name of its genus. 

There is distance and casual and laughter and the only thing filling the canyon of negative space between us is willing smiles to believe in it. I am not allowed to trouble this love that is the safest possible love by letting out the child’s-whimper inside my throat.

In a country, founded by the eyes of children, stood a large forest. By day the dawn sun would turn the leaves into emerald eyes so the trees could see, and at night the moon would turn them into shadow voices for the wind.

In the heart of the wood lived a small bird. His wings were not a swans, but they were his own. His feathers were not that of a phoenix, but they were his own. What was entirely his own though, was his song. 

He sang in the bright notes of crystals knocking against each other with a sadness he disguised behind the song’s prettiness.

Travelers would stop for a brief minute to his music, but walk away.

The bird decided, instead of having others hear but not listen his music, which was his heart, he would keep his voice for himself in the chamber of his throat.

The forest lost its most tender song.

We kissed a kiss the lonely slit wrists for. The neon heart above stopped its hesitant flickering and glowed steady: bright, pink, abrasive. God had to restrain himself from cutting the image of us out of reality and setting it in a Lovers tarot card.

He was perched on legs that towered above the Biblical Apocalypse, over Purgatory, past the nine circles of Hell and ended at the golden-gated Paradise of his crotch.