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My name is Luna and I am a mermaid. I live with my mother in the Pacific Ocean. I have brown hair and green eyes like Mom and I was glad about that because I love her and I wanted to have those things in common with her. My tail was red and hers was purple.
For five-hundred million years there have been merpeople cities at the bottom of every sea and ocean in the world. Just like humans, we started out primitive and uncivilized, but we have learned and built civilizations. We had hundreds of thousands of cities all over the world. Each one had kings and queens, but they were elected like human presidents, instead of inheriting the throne. Everything had become extremely intricate because of how long our species has been on this planet: politics, shipment of goods, education…etc. We have studied everything on this planet and even figured out how to study things and living creatures on land, including humans.
The city I lived in was more than two million years old, even though it had evolved so much it looked nothing like it originally did. But that was a good thing because it had been improved upon.
Merpeople also had magic. We could cast spells by waving our arms. We could also shoot electricity out of our hands. Mom and I didn’t have magic and I didn’t know why.
Mom was always telling me stories about how our family used to be. Since I was one year old, our family hasn’t been close. We didn’t talk and we didn’t spend time together. We didn’t get along.
We used to get along and spend a lot of time together. We used to be close and my parents used to live together with me and my five older sisters. We also got along with all four of my grandparents.
I loved to listen to the stories Mom told me about the rest of the family. We both wanted our family to be close again. I had been one year old when we were separated.
My parents, my sisters, my grandparents and I had been at a family gathering. Mom and I left for a few minutes and when we came back everyone was leaving. Dad left alone. Two of my sisters left together. Two other sisters wanted to leave separately. My last sister left with my mother’s parents and my father’s parents left together. This was how we all lived our lives. We haven’t seen much of each other since that gathering and most of us didn’t want to see each other.
Some of my sisters had been too young to live alone, but they didn’t want to live with my parents or the rest of my family, so Dad found them other families. My Mom, Grace, didn’t like that, but my sisters didn’t want to live with her, so she had to let them live with other people. But it didn’t end there. Mom was constantly checking on the rest of the family. She talked to their neighbors or the people who had raised her kids. No one in the family wanted anything to do with the others or Mom or me.
Mom once told me that there had been a problem during my birth, so it had to be done surgically, not naturally. Dad couldn’t see it. I was okay with that because I liked to think that my birth was something just between Mom and me. We didn’t share it with anyone else. I didn’t count the doctors because they weren’t family, it was business for them.
When I was little, Mom said she didn’t know what had happened with the rest of the family. She tried to get everyone to talk. She tried more than once with everyone. She thought of her arguments before she went to talk to them. She was a senator, so she was good at coming up with arguments and convincing people. She understood how people thought. She thought of what she had to say and perfected her words before she talked. But it didn’t work with my family.
Some members were okay together, but they didn’t want to connect with others. Mom tried for years, but she ran out of ways to convince them. She still wanted to and kept thinking of ways, but she hasn’t found anything new yet. Her friends went with her several times to convince the rest of the family, but they wouldn’t listen to reason. Mom was upset about that and her friends helped her. She didn’t feel the same way about her family as they did about her and neither did I.
I also wanted to fix things. Mom introduced me to the family many times, but they didn’t want me. I talked to them, but they wouldn’t listen.
Mom did her best to protect me. I didn’t have a whole family, but Mom did everything to give me what I needed. She was there for me and she taught me a lot of things. She made sure I had the best education I could have. She was supportive of my friends. She told me stories about my family and did everything she could to make up for the fact that they weren’t there by providing everything for me, material and emotional, without spoiling me. She still taught me how harsh life could be and that sometimes people couldn’t get what they wanted, but she was still there for me. When I was younger she taught me not to be selfish or spoiled and to take responsibility for my mistakes.
I was happy with Mom because she was so great and I couldn’t remember the rest of my family. But there were times when my family felt like it was too small. Like when Mom would get sick and couldn’t take care of me so well. I did a good job taking care of myself in these situations, but it was scary that there was no one else to back me up, in case I needed it. And I loved the rest of my family and I wanted them back in my life. I noticed whenever Mom missed the family, but the most I could do was cuddle with her. Mom told me I was too young to know what to do and it wasn’t my job to listen to her talk about these things. Her friends were there for her.
I would have gotten the family back together if I could have just for Mom’s sake, even though I wanted that too. Mom helped me whenever I wanted to talk about my family or what I was missing. I did everything I could to help around the house when I got older and to help Mom feel better by suggesting fun things to do. We dug for fossils with enchanted shovels and talked about extinct animals. Mom once told me that I did help.
