Hi!

Where I come from, we don't really use names. On land, of course, that will be different. There, I'm known as Lele. So – hi, my name is Lele, and I'm a mermaid. You may know mermaids from fairy-tales or Disney movies, but as any good story, the truth is hidden in plain sight. Reality, however, can be more boring, or more exciting than any story. That will depend on you, whether you are human or you breathe water. We both are creatures of our free will, but we are also restricted by the circumstances we live in. In the, rules are simple – kill or be killed. Humans claim to have something different; they call it culture or civilization. They call themselves rational beings, but they seem overly emotional to me, and they are often driven by the same basic instincts as we are. In comparison to other sea creatures, animals, we maybe seem more evolved, but we don't think that we are in any way special amongst the species. We are just we, and we live and die as everyone else. But we do have a kind of language; we even have words that can be written down. So we are able to think, and we do think.

By the way, I'm sorry, but English is not my first language. My first human language has been Italian, because my home is in the Mediterranean, we live in the northern Adriatic Sea. My family, my whole clan always has had contact to people on the land, as far as we remember, and we are even related to some human people. That side of my family claims mermaid ancestry back to times when there still was a thing called the Roman Empire. What I have read about biology, this would be too far in the past to create a real blood bond – otherwise every human being on planet Earth would be family to every other person being alive now. But I certainly don't see such a bond amongst humans. They like to differentiate themselves from others, be it through religion, or what they call race and nation. Those concepts are very alien to me personally, since I like to think about my family as a unity of individuals who depend on each other, ensuring our survival in the wet wilderness.

Nevertheless, there are some people living in the small town of Grado, on the Adriatic coast east of Venice, who never have forgotten their connection to us, and they have kept their secret very well. My grandmother has been living on land with them, as my mother has done, and I had done it. We always return to the water, but we will come on land every winter, when the coastline is clear of the numerous summer tourist and the bays and lagoons are quiet under the sky.

Living in the ocean has become more and more complicated. Busy harbors caused an increasing amount of ship traffic, with all the pollution and noise that brings. Fishermen have always come out, but today the industrial fishing decimates the aquatic flora. This doesn't matter, since we go on land and buy food, if needed. Money we do have, and I even have a driving license, a passport and a bank account in my name. With the human part of our family, we do own land, which creates an income. So farmers pay us to use our land for farming, and with that money we can buy food if we need to. The concept of money I do understand, sometimes I think better than some humans. I think there's a very primal idea of taking and giving connected with it. We don't use money under water, since we normally can find everything we need. But it's hard to find a computer under the sea.

At least a working one. Otherwise, everything is down there, since people think of the sea as a big dumping site for everything they don't want anymore. I'm a nice mermaid, but sometimes I want to pull the rubbish on land and throw it back into the houses of the humans. But I don't think humans are intelligent enough to understand why I would do that and become angry. Like I said, humans are much too emotional and often lack rational judgement. Sometimes, even Andrea agrees with me.