I started remembering at four months. The haziness lifted gradually from my vision until I could recognize sights as normal. The dark brown blobs in my general vicinity turned into chairs and tables and the greens faded into crisp outlines of individual blades of grass with morning dew still stuck on the tips and the blues turned into the toys and trinkets mom brought home from her job at the aquarium. I enjoyed playing with those toys the most, because whenever I picked up a plastic dolphin or turtle, a little voice in my head grew louder and louder until it felt as though someone was telling me stories about the great creatures of the sea. My mom's smile became the center of my attention, and I always dragged small hands over her face to memorize every line, dimple, curve, everything.
As the days trickled into weeks and months and my sleep schedule stabilized into something more normal, at six months old a clarity hit me so hard that I was disoriented for the next few hours. When I came to, I saw mom looking down into what I believed was my crib.
"Mama," I crooned at the woman who was the light, the shining beacon, a smiling fixture that was my warmth.
She lit up in the way she did all the time whenever I said that. "Hey baby," she said softly, running hands into the thick clump of hair that almost ran into my line of vision.
"My name?" Words were difficult to enunciate in a chubby and stiff tongue, but I made do.
However, something so innocent of a question made something inside me churn out painful signals like rusted clogs being forced to operate. This ominous foreboding sent a chill down my spine, but it was ignored, because I was just a baby, nothing could hurt me, nothing would want to hurt me.
Mom reached into the baby blue painted crib with her abnormally large arms relative to my small body, and picked me up right to her chest. I could hear the soft and steady pounding of her heartbeat as she announced my name.
"My little Percy. Percy Jackson."
And that was the moment where my heart stopped beating.
It was terrifying, because suddenly I was forced to recall a previous life, one where I had gone by another name with a different family. The safety of just mom wasn't there, because there had been an absent father, drunk mother, abusive siblings, and fear and coldness and the frigidity of fear and I don't want to die no stop help me I'm drowning I'm drowning I'mdrowningdrowningdrowningdrowning…!
The gentle waves had become wilder and fiercer the farther out I swam. The deepness of the open and empty abyss haunted me, because it looked me right in the eye and there was nothing but the abyss and darkness and the absolute certainty that I would not survive the rest of the night. The saltiness burned my eyes and nose and ears and every crevice the water crawled into froze me. Rough scrapes of whatever was beneath my toes, flailing arms, the bitter cold of a lost soul.
A fear of the deep ocean.
Yes? No? Maybe?
Fuck.
Because now I was born into someone else's body, Percy fucking Jackson, some chosen savior of the world that used to just be words on paper, maybe a world to dream about in some delusional preteen's mind.
On that night when I was six months old, asking for my name, a part of me died. I don't know if it that was a part of Percy or a part of me (just a cold, frozen, waterlogged body somewhere in the middle of the Pacific). But it didn't matter in the moment because that was when I decided to fuck the rules of the Fates or whatever Percy was supposed to do according to the Prophecy, because I was going to make this life mine. Did I feel ashamed that this was just me cheating at a chance for a new beginning? Perhaps. But did I care? No. It wasn't my fault that I reduced the real Perseus into some husk into the void, it was the cogs of the universe, of time and time of itself. Whatever deities out there might not have directly affected my soul to that length, but the aftereffects of the wave resulted in this new life I wasn't just going to throw away for the sake of justice and morality. Fictional Percy Jackson had been a good, loyal person. He fought against monsters and tried to spread equality to all. Me? At best, I was morally flexible.
At seven months, I gargled weird noises and high-pitched whines to practice my speech. The inflexible organ in my mouth was such a pain, I would have given up on learning how to speak eons ago if I didn't want to suffer in the boredom of "baby talk." My vocabulary expanded past just "mama" into real fucking sentences over the next few months.
At nine months, I switched from aggressively crawling to stumbling around to walking and running and skipping. The joy of freedom of movement felt better than any shot of heroin or orgasm or five-star massage. Once I could walk and speak, I felt like I could climb to the top of the Empire State Building and command the universe with just my toddler babble. Pop tarts for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Playtime and naptime everyday always. Also known as, flipping off all my enemies so hard that my middle finger disappeared up their ass to the point that I could see my finger from down their esophagus.
Okay, maybe not.
When I saw a small cameo of someone a TV show's credits named "Tristan McLean," I almost whooped in laughter and told mom to search up this actor.
And mom.
Mom.
Sally Jackson was a goddess by her own right. She was the epitome of perfection – more beautiful than Aphrodite, more perfect for motherhood that Hera, more brave than whatever god of war descended from Ares. She had dark brown hair that matched mine in intensity and thickness, with fluffiness and a hint of curls towards the bangs. Obviously Poseidon was doing his divine intervention for the first few years of my life, because we magically had an apartment in the price-crazy New York City with mom only going to work over the weekends (she carried me with her in a baby-wrap-scarf-thing) while paying a tremendous amount for my baby supplies and our combined human needs. To sum it up, I loved her.
And she loved me. It was an awesome feeling.
At thirteen months, we went up to a beach in Montauk. The beach house mom rented was cool, in the spooky serial killer lair kind of way, but once we cleared the spider webs and gross icky material imbedded in the wall (still curious about what that was, no lie), it became livable. Homey. Nice. Better than looking out past the sands and seeing the dark, splashing waves that made me feel powerless.
As a baby, adults usually rant about adult things to other adults, expecting the kids not having the mental capacity to remember or understand what they were talking about. I, however, was a rude exception to whatever private moment one Sally Jackson wanted to have.
She carried me to the edge of the pier on the empty beach because there wasn't any avoiding an encounter with the ocean anyway because I was the son of the god of the sea but that didn't mean I didn't pretend that hiding in mom's arms protected me from the helpless feeling that made me wish I hadn't completed diaper training so early in the game. Nothing but a little boy against the whole, wide world.
"Hey Poseidon," I heard her whisper, and I felt the need to scrunch up into a small ball and be unnoticeable. This was going to become a private conversation that I had no part in eavesdropping in. She spoke about her general life, welfare, my baby firsts, I was the best (if not peculiar) child for being so well-behaved, and I attempted to drone out the parts that I had no business listening to.
When she finished talking, I heard the rocking of the mildly unsteady wooden pier, loud splashing, and sudden silence. The smell of salt and purity grew closer to my unsuspecting body until almost supernaturally, I responded to the stimulus.
Mom gently set me down by her side, allowing me the grace to turn to face a man with black hair and sea green eyes. He reached out to tenderly touch my cheek with his calloused hands. In my shock, I allowed him to touch my face. Was this? What? Dad? Poseidon? What?
"You've grown Perseus," was all he said before dissipating into bubbles before my eyes. A strong stench of saltwater and kelp wafted over mom and I as I contemplated what had just happened in a manner of seconds.
For the next few days in Montauk, I played in the shallowest part of the water, still shrieking whenever a wave lapped up to the sands.
(Fun fact: minnows are absolute bitches. All they talk about are themselves)
Driving back to Manhattan, I peeked outside the window from what I could see from the angle of sitting in a booster seat, and saw the waves form a shaky hand waving goodbye that matched my own.
In the driver's seat, Sally has tears running down her cheeks to meet a smile.
At three years old, I was out playing in a park just outside the city (aka an hour car ride out), zooming between tree trunks, smelling sickly sweet honeysuckles, grabbing English Ivy and tearing it up with chubby sausage fingers. There was a narrow creek situated between the park benches and the bark chip playground, with a sturdy metal bridge connecting the two together. I took mom's hand and guided her towards the bubbling and splashing water, telling her that I had found a special secret that shhhhh! nobody else can find out.
"What is it, Percy?" She asked, smoothing calloused fingers over the messy fluff that was my hair.
"Mom, I think the water likes me!" I whisper-yelled into her ear, edging up for the eventual confrontation that I wanted with her. If it had been explained that Sally Jackson explained my heritage to me before going to Camp Half-Blood, then it wouldn't at all be suspicious to be slightly more knowledgeable than the average demigod.
A small scrape on my palm from falling off the plastic slide stung with contact with the cool liquid, but the pain disappeared in a matter of seconds, along with the cut. The blood fizzled out of the wound, and the skin appeared to stitch itself back up.
Magical.
Yet dangerous, read mom's expression.
With lightning quick speed, she grabbed my wrist and looked me square in the eye. The rapid movements frightened me, but I supposed she was even more frightened by the situation. Monsters were everywhere, waving in and out of the Mist, a barrier that even I couldn't penetrate through yet. All but a helpless young demigod child and a mortal woman. I understood the gravity of what I had just revealed to the outside of my mindscape. Anyone could have seen - anything could have seen, something did see? Nobody had 360 degree vision, how could I tell that my domain was revealed to unwitting eyes?
Mom shook my wrist like a dead fish, a fervor in her eyes that temporarily had me stuck in place. "Percy, Percy, don't do that again."
"You're scaring me," I choked out, hating the moment of stupidity and boredom that led to this moment.
She was unrelenting. "Promise me, Percy. Please."
"Okay," I replied in sniffles, definitely not crying.
However, it was not the first time that the encapsulating water would leave my control. The more that I grew stronger and faster and better, the more a growling want to learn how to dominate the crashing recess of darkness that was thicker than syrup in the depravity that was me. Could I command the oceans, the sand, the creatures of the sea, the thick brine of the air? Power was all I felt some nights, when the sound of the sea filled my head till it metaphorically burst into rough crashes against my cranium. My eyes and nose burned with the scent of salt, sharp and tangy resonating across the thrashes of my bedroom, fighting against the blackness of the night sky reflecting through the small window across my bed. The blood of the Gods ran through my veins, and the sharp contrast of my previous body was as real as it could be when moments like this passed by.
And as I aged, my scent only grew stronger.
And stronger.
And stronger.
When I was four years old, in the cramped and musty nursery room mom had placed me in so she could go back to work, contained a monster.
It was a small, pathetic little creature, only by happenstance it slithered into this nursery room and caught the direct scent of a child of the gods. The demon snake was only half the size of a gardener snake, but the miasma that oozed out of the brick red scales screamed evil. It inched closer to my napping spot, coiled up and loosened its jaw to attack, but I reacted faster. Soft, delicate hands grabbed the snake by its brightly colored midsection and squeezed. It hissed violently, almost loud enough to wake up the other children napping besides me. But I squeezed and squeezed until it stopped wriggling.
Dead.
A cold ambience rushed over my head. I was enchanted by the simplicity of this creature's death, quicker and less painful than my own. The haunting miasma escaped the snake's body and dispersed into powder that glinted in the balmy light of the nursery like wet saffron. The mild odor of the snake's venom leaked out and hit my nose harder than any rush of cigarette smoke. This was how mom found me, grimacing with the remains of a squishy corpse just as nap time ended and parents had to pick us up. Her hands visibly shook as she made me dispose of the carcass and wash my hands.
I heard her mumble to herself in the car ride home that my scent was growing stronger, and this was terrible, terrible, terrible because I was technically too young to learn about my station and learn how to protect myself.
Not too young, I wanted to scream. I wanted to scream and shout and kick and wail and cry because I understood exactly what was going on and I needed to get to the camp earlier because a recall of the Real Percy's life had a bunch of children unnecessarily sacrifice their life for something so insignificant as a God being irresponsible enough to sire their breed into a wretched monster-filled world, laden with unforsaken demons.
But I didn't.
I didn't because Sally Jackson meant the world to all the Percy Jacksons in the fucking universe, and just abandoning her for a half-baked quest with the body of a toddler would not suffice. No, she deserved the world, and I was her world (but I'm still drowning, drowningdrowningdrowning..!)
Never could I be responsible enough to always take care of her, but for now, it was okay to live out a childhood. The guise of innocence. A happy beginning.
(A wretched ending)