People wonder what it is that comes off of me like a repellent scent when they look at me. Trust me. All my life I’ve wondered, too. I imagine too much, I think, and imagination leads me down paths where reality is merged with legend and legend becomes the truth. But, I suppose, what’s true in the mind is what’s true, and where legend is concerned, it works on the emotion and emotion is what really moves people even when they don’t have a reason. Instinct is guidance. Legend is what you become when nothing else makes sense.

Someone once told me that if souls were rivers, we could walk into almost all of them and get our feet wet but if someone walked into mine, they'd drown. I can't help what I am, though, no matter how much I fight against it. But I can prevent people from walking into the river. Of course, it comes at my own expense because unless I dry up, which I hardly believe could ever happen, I am left alone with myself. If I am nothing but a river and if I let no one in, who will throw me a life-float when I begin to drown? And what difference would it make anyway since it would only be water trying escape from itself?

Last year I heard a legend and I tried to chase after it for a grade. It turned out that some legends aren't written about. They're only spoken. I lost myself in that legend, the one of a half-fish (or half-snake) half-woman. It's a European myth. It's a myth that I might have once been a part of if I hadn't been made in America. But mythologies parallel themselves across the human race. Part of me is still standing there, on the banks of the River Alzette in Luxembourg City, in the Grund, staring up at the cliff that really is nothing more than the overrun ruins of an old tenth-century castle.

Luxembourg is a place where you can lose yourself and recreate yourself from nothing again. That's how beautiful it is. Part of me is still standing on the banks, waiting for Melusine the mermaid to pop her head up out of the water and start stitching one more link on the chain-mail vest. I want to catch her so that the city won't fall into the hole and die. I want to be her, so I can escape myself and refuse to be a river.

Imagine that! An American sitting on the banks of the River Alzette waiting for a mermaid to show up. I know. I'm a joke. But I want to know where that legend came from. I want to escape this and stop worrying, stop drowning in myself, stop missing the people I never had but thought I did. So put myself into fantasy and study it like an academic...Is that a remedy? Or a cop out?

Maybe a little bit of both.