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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Trash_Tia on 2024-11-08 21:54:42+00:00.

I’m currently completely at a loss what to do.

I (21f) have just escaped my parents, after finding something horrifying in my dad’s beach house.

I’ve always loved mermaids.

Yes, I was one of those kids obsessed with everything mermaid—whether that was TV shows, movies, books—any marine-related media, really, but mermaids especially.

I loved everything about the sea, about water, until I almost drowned on my fifth birthday.

So, with a newfound fear of even dipping my toes in the shallows, I became fascinated with fake water instead.

Mom called it a mental illness. (I can see where she was coming from, considering I asked for every pool or water-related game ever made.) But I was just a kid.

I preferred water to land, and even terrified of it, I still wanted to submerge myself in it, imagining a whole other world.

I barely remember almost drowning, only the contorting fear twisting inside me and swallowing me up, the inability to speak, my voice cruelly torn away, my breath stolen as I sank further into the abyss—also known as the deep end of our neighbor’s pool.

Mom said I didn’t realize it was that deep since I was used to our own pool.

There I was, sitting on the edge with my legs swinging and a plate of birthday cake in my hands, when I had the bright idea to show the adults how cute I was.

This is my mom’s retelling, so it’s probably exaggerated, but apparently, I dropped headfirst into the pool, cake and all, and sank straight to the bottom.

Dad dove in after me, pulling me back to the surface, dragging me from the shallows.

But it was too late.

I was screaming, hysterical, backing away from the pool like it was filled with lava.

The crazy thing is, I remember this exact feeling. I remember staggering back, the ice-cold breeze tickling my cheeks feeling wrong compared to the warmth of the water that was supposed to protect me.

The ice cold concrete of my neighbor’s patio felt wrong.

Land felt wrong.

The water, that had almost killed me, felt right, and I could never understand why.

Instead of caressing me, this cruel underwater world had dragged me down, down, down, squeezing my lungs and stealing my air, crushing instead of cradling me. I avoided water and didn’t go near any pool after that, even ours; the very one I used to spend every spare hour splashing around in.

When Mom tried to bathe me, I insisted on the water being ankle-deep, with her using a cup to rinse my hair as I tilted my head back, squeezing my eyes shut.

According to Mom, I would scream until my throat was raw if there was too much water.

Even washing my hands and brushing my teeth, I remember timing the flow just right, so I could stick my toothbrush or soapy hands under, count three elephants, and then dive out of the bathroom. I flooded the floors on multiple occasions when I forgot to turn off the faucet.

But still, somehow, I was fascinated with water itself.

I loved how it was still, how it ran and trickled and filled my cupped hands….

According to Mom, I told my therapist I wanted to be a fish.

However, my therapist had a sort of resolution. She leaned forward and grabbed my hands, squeezing them tight.

“Okay, Sadie, well, if you’re scared of real water, why don’t you try fake water?”

Which, I guess, is how my mermaid obsession started.

My therapist started me with little kids’ games about solving puzzles underwater—and immediately, I was hooked.

Through my fascination with digital water, I found mermaids—beautiful, human-like fish people who could breathe underwater, living in vast, towering cities deep, deep under the sea.

I watched every Little Mermaid, bingeing mermaid-themed movies and TV shows.

By the age of nine, I was fully convinced I was actually a mermaid, and touching water would magically transform my legs into a tail.

It didn’t, obviously, so I did what any supposedly mentally ill nine-year-old would do. I swallowed two teaspoons of salt mixed with tears of terror before sticking my head underwater for ten seconds.

Again, nothing happened.

But I was starting to slowly overcome my fear of being submerged in water, so I lowered myself onto the stairs in the shallow end of our pool and forced myself to get used to it.

I was still acclimating when my brother shoved my head under, quickly reminding me of that sensation—the squeezing of my chest, the inability to breathe, choking on bubbles exploding around me. After that, Dad insisted on teaching me how to swim.

Like me, he’d always been fascinated with water, so he refused to have a child who couldn’t swim. Before my older brother and I were even born, he enrolled us in lessons. Harvey was five years older than me, so he could already swim. Dad wanted to take me to the sea, though I was more comfortable in the pool.

However, my swimming classes were short-lived (I barely learned how to keep my head afloat) when Dad left in the middle of the night and never came back. But… neither did my brother.

I woke up around midnight to Mom hysterically crying. I discovered the next morning that Dad had taken my brother hookah diving without proper equipment, and Harvey was in the emergency room.

Initially, I was told my brother was very sick, which, obviously, I believed.

I was playing Sonic with my brother only yesterday! In my head, he was just sick in the hospital.

I spent the day expecting him to drag himself into my bedroom at any time, knock something over, call me a name, and run away. But the house was empty.

Mom didn’t come out of her room.

Not even to take me to school. Instead, I watched Cartoon Network all day. I poked my head in my brother’s room, and it was a noticeable mess, clothes strewn everywhere and a half-packed suitcase.

When I asked to see Harvey a few days later, Mom told me he was dead.

Brain-dead, at least.

She explained it the best she could, choking on her own words.

Harvey had gone too deep, and when trying to resurface, his blood had bubbles and his brain had popped.

I don’t think she was mentally okay enough to explain to her nine-year-old daughter that her brother was dead.

Yeah, no, considering she used our soda stream and a grape to demonstrate the accident with a hysterical smile on her mouth, almost like she thought it was funny. I didn’t find it funny.

Watching the bubbles in the water and my mother pop a grape between her index and thumb with a huge grin on her face was actually fucking traumatising.

I know people grieve in their own way. Even as a kid though, I was confused when my brother didn’t get a funeral.

Dad did come back, but only to try and justify his trip with Harvey. He said it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and that he was just doing what was best for his kids.

I already despised him for taking my brother away, but the way he talked about him, insisting that “Harvey loves the water!” made me want to scream.

He was wrong. While I was obsessed with water, my brother had steered away from it, especially the sea. Mom called him a psycho and threw him out.

Dad moved to the other side of town, and it was just Mom and me once again.

For a long time, I hated my father. I ignored his letters, calls, texts, and the mermaid figurines he sent me for my birthday. I didn’t understand grieving, and worse, post-grieving.

Did such a thing exist?

I understood that I was sad, and sometimes I was happy—before feeling guilty for catching myself smiling.

I missed him, so I got a diary. I wrote to my brother, telling him everything and nothing, sometimes just what I did that day, or telling him how mom was.

I started attending group therapy.

One girl said she forgave her father for killing her mother in a car crash but her words became entangled in my mind, frustrating me, bleeding into confusion and anger I couldn’t control.

How could she forgive something like that? I asked her after, and she shrugged and said, “It wasn’t his fault.”

“But it was my dad’s fault,” I told her, leaning forward in my chair. “He killed my brother.”

The girl, Mia, I think her name was (I could never read her name-tag– it was either Mia, or Mira) folded her arms, shooting me a glare. “Well, maybe you should forgive him.”

When I asked Mom in the car on the way home, she said the exact same thing.

“It was an accident, Sadie,” Mom said. “Your father took your brother diving, and he wasn’t ready.” She averted her gaze, her hands tightening around the wheel. “Harvey asked him to take him out during a storm.”

Something ice cold trickled down my spine. “But you said—”

She said Harvey didn’t want to go diving.

There wasn’t a storm that night. I would have heard it.

She said my brother hated the ocean, and he wanted no part of it.

Mom’s eyes darkened, and she opened her mouth like she was going to speak, before changing the subject, flicking on the radio. “Do you want to get takeout tonight?”

I wanted to question her, but I didn’t even know what to ask.

But then I was questioning my own memories.

Did Mom say what I remembered, or did I mishear her?

It took me a long time to realize maybe Harvey’s death wasn’t Dad’s fault after all.

After a while of therapy, and listening to other kids’ stories, I started to wonder if hating him was the right thing to do.

Mom was talking to him civilly, at least. The two of them met for coffee every Saturday, and Mom seemed like she had genuinely forgiven him.

The other kids asked me if my Mom was *ove…

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