“Stolen Pelt”; by Shimi; March 24, 2025
Someone stole my pelt.
It wasn’t a man that took it from me to steal me as his bride like a traditional selkie story.
It wasn’t my mother or my father, trying to hide the truth from me because I came into the world wearing an animal skin.
It wasn’t even the doctor who delivered me, trying to make me live a human life because I was some “abomination”.
I should have had a pelt, but it never came. My blood, my bones, my very soul seem to cry out for a life I never got the opportunity to live. Born for a pelt I would never wear. A body I could never change into. Something I could only imagine by watching others of my kind, sitting on the docks in communal groups in comfort while I’m “other”. The furless, bipedal creature that can’t enter the water like they can, watching them with my tiny eyes and hair that sprouts from my head and wearing my funny clothes.
To me, I am them.
To them, I am human.
This fact never killed my instincts. Since I could move, I have wanted to be near water. My infant hands would play with cubes of ice and reach for videos on the old TV screen of oceans and pools and water spraying from broken pipes with a smile on my face. I couldn’t keep my hands out of the duck ponds and city fountains once I was able to walk. Then, when I could swim, seemingly no one could take me out of the pool. Even a near drowning experience only made me frustrated, wanting to learn how to swim better so I could go under the water next time.
One year, I found the show H2O: Just Add Water, and I was mesmerized. The idea of being able to visit some magical moon pool and suddenly be able to stay in the sea, swimming effortlessly with a tail I could conjure up at any time was a dream come true. My unrestricted internet access led me down the wormhole of “real spells online”, and I was wearing a necklace everyday blessed under some full moon and drinking salty water from a jar every day. I could cry and cry and cry all day when I never developed a single scale, never got a selkie pelt, and couldn’t go under the water the way I wanted to.
I can’t explain it. I don’t know why I am the way I am, but clearly something about me was misplaced when I was born. My wiring, my soul, something innate is meant to be off the land. My hands feel webbed and like they’re missing claws. My teeth feel too short compared to what I seem to know they should be. I always want salmon and tuna and trout, yet will never be able to take a bite of any of them. I was born in a dry place, as if trying to keep me away on purpose. I don’t know anyone in my life who doesn’t think of me as some sort of water being, comparing me often to seals, otters, mermaids, water birds, and yet I feel so much like a selkie who has been forcibly trapped in a house, being told to forget who I am, to not look for the pelt, to not dip my toes in the tides.
It’s unfair. I was robbed. Someone took my pelt, and there’s nothing I can do about that. But it will never stop me from trying to get as close as possible to living how I was meant to. It won’t stop me from walking into the freezing waters at the marina. From digging through sand with my bare hands. From eating every shellfish that crosses my path. From immersing myself, clothes and all, into the running river hidden away behind the trees. From walking the halls with a fur blanket draped around my shoulders, dragging along the artifical floors while I pretend they’re sand and rock. From visiting my kind in the wild, even if they look back at me and cannot see what I feel. I’ll be waiting forever to get in the water, but I have done what I can by moving towards the coast and out of the mountainous alpine desert.
Nothing will take my spirit from me, even when everything else has been stripped away.
A selkie is a selkie, even without her pelt.