![]() Like the little mermaid, I didn’t have a voice. In my daydreams, I longed to be like the titular protagonist, transforming and moving between worlds like she did, not realizing until years later that in some ways I already kind of had. ![]() Similar to many kids born in the nineties, I fell in love with Disney’s version of The Little Mermaid, cracking open the clamshell cassette case (and yes, I am dating myself by writing this) and playing the story of a young mermaid who wanted to see more out of the world than the life she had, fall in love with a human prince, and lost and regained her voice along the way on repeat. Even when my legs did not fuse together like they did with the protagonist of Liz Kessler’s The Tail of Emily Windsnap, at least the shadow of them imprinted like a tail on the concrete floor of the pool bridged the gap between reality and fantasy. I moved my “tail” up and down in a full-body wave motion like the cartoon sirens did on-screen my hands outstretched before me. In the pool with my sister, I would press my legs together as tightly as I could, imagining they were bound with string. When I was a little kid, I used to pretend to be a mermaid. ![]()
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