Greenstones

On my second-to-last day on Iona, I donned my runners and walked to the southeast side of the island—across the fields of sheep, through one and then two and then a final rusted farmer’s gate—and made my way down to the sea. It had rained the night before and the ground was soft and spongy. I squelched through the grasses and got to the sand and collected handfuls of the speckled greenstones that dot the beaches.
In some circles, the stones are known as Mermaid’s Tears. The legend goes like this: once there was a mermaid who fell in love with a young Ionan fisherman. But because she did not have a soul, the mermaid knew that the fisherman would never marry her. She prayed to God each day and asked of Him this simple thing: please God, please give me a soul. And each night she would come ashore on the island and sit herself beneath the fisherman’s window and wait, but by the morning she knew that God had not yet answered her prayer and so she would run back to the sea, crying as she fled, and the tears that fell from her eyes onto the beach became the stones.
If you carry the stones with you, the legend says, you’ll never drown. And if you have a broken heart and you throw them into the sea, God will hear your prayers and heal you.
Or something. I filled my pockets anyway. The stones were so pretty—smooth and shimmering, flecked with bits of white and darker green. The married man and I were just friends then, nothing more—my heart hadn’t yet cracked. I thought only of making a necklace, or a bracelet. Something I could carry with me, something I could remember.
When I flew home and unpacked I saw that the stones I’d gathered were mostly white and beige. There were no green stones at all. Something about the light and the way it reflected off the sea had made them seem other than they appeared—they had been beautiful on the beach in a way that they no longer were. The light, somehow, had gone from them too.
I still have them, tucked away in a drawer. I might yet make a necklace, or a bracelet, or something different altogether. Smooth my fingers over these tiny rocks and find the words for that which I’ve been missing, this thing that I keep searching for each time I fly away.
Maybe the legend got it wrong—maybe the mermaid already had a soul. Maybe her only mistake was in thinking, somehow, that it was tied up, captured, whatever, in the life of the man that she watched from her place in the sea.