“So we went to the Alamo, which really is a heroic story once you call Dad to explain it.” – travel journal entry – Day12

Why I’m Single

I’ve been taking a lot of baths lately.  It might be because of my ears.

“There’s a whole spectrum of what it means to be a man,” my dad says, and when he says “what it means to be a man” he doesn’t mean a male adult, which I am.  He means that I am somewhere undefinable on the evolutionary scale.

To be more specific, as a fetus, I did not lose all of the physical traits and characteristics one generally outgrows in the womb.  To be exact, I have gills—these little slits behind both ears, covered by little flaps of skin, like paper cuts at sharp angles, only thicker.  I don’t still have a tail.  That would be weird.

I don’t have a wife, either, and I guess that at this stage in my life, that’s a bit strange too.

My mother says they’re not gills.  She says that the doctor grabbed me with the forceps behind my ears and they left a dent that never undented.  But to hear my father explain it, it’s much more fantastic.  “They had to get you out that way,” he says, “because you wanted to spend your life swimming around in there like a sea monkey.  The reason they grabbed you by the gills is so that it wouldn’t be a shock to your system to breathe air all the sudden.  You had to ease into it,” he says, “so they pinched them closed, your mouth and nose too.  You know, we kept you in a fish tank for the first week.  Just gradually removing pails full of water so that you could slowly adjust.  We saturated cotton balls and hydrated behind your ears until you were six.”

Now I clean them once a week with cotton swabs.  It’s not a big deal if I forget, but I like to stay on top of things.

I still sleep on a waterbed, just to hear the sloshing.

I know the truth of the matter is somewhere in the middle of merman and malpractice.

One time, when I was four, I woke up and found a pearl on my pillow.  Mom says I’d just found part of her earring that had come unglued, that she’d lost it when she’d kissed me goodnight, that I’d already been sleeping and hadn’t noticed.  That in the dark, neither had she.  Dad said he wasn’t sure the Tooth Fairy picked up gill treasures, but he’d make a few phone calls.  The next night, I got a sand dollar, which kind of just seemed like beachcombers swapping one shell for another, but whatever.

I had a girlfriend for a while.  She was really interested in my ears.  Finally, I let her look and I think she was disappointed.  She just said “Oh, huh,” and went on eating her flatbread.  Then she said she used to have her navel pierced and that’s when I realized what kind of girl she was.

Anyway, I’ve been taking a lot of baths lately.  I’ve evolved to feel most human when I am naked and alone.