As Soft As You Remember
I am a Selkie, a shapeshifter who lives as a seal in the water, but, on certain nights, can take off my seal skin and move as a human upon the land. Years ago, my skin was stolen from me by someone who said she loved me, and its loss kept me anchored to her and to the human world.
How was the skin taken from you? What was your first impression of the one who took it? How and where did you find it again?
Today, my long search has been rewarded—I have found my skin.
As I hold it in my hands, memories surface. I think of the girl who took it. The first time I saw her, she was wearing a school uniform from the local middle school. Her nameplate marked her as a second-year student. She sat alone on the shore, gazing across the horizon. When the sun began to set, she brushed off the sand and returned to the city.
She came almost every day. Sometimes she cried, but mostly, she just sat in the sand, lost in thought, earphones in. Then, one evening, she looked different—more exhausted than ever. Her hair was unkempt, bruises marred her arms and legs, and her school bag was missing. The air around her had changed. That day, instead of walking home at sunset, she stepped into the water, looking determined.
I have seen many let their lives slip away in this manner. It is not our duty to intervene in the affairs of those who have chosen to drown. But that day was different. She was only twelve. I went after her, pulled her from the tide, and laid her on the shore. She coughed up seawater —then looked up at me. That was how we met.
As we grew closer, she confided in me. She was bullied at school. Every day was a living hell. She lingered on the shore until sunset because she didn’t want to go home and admit that she had no friends to spend time with.
She used to say she envied me —how I could escape into the ocean when life on land became too difficult. I didn’t realize, then, that she was foreshadowing what was to come.
The day she took my skin was her birthday. The day before, she had worried aloud about her parents realizing she had no friends—there would be no gifts. I wanted to ease her loneliness, so I ventured into the human world to buy her flowers and a birthday card. But when I returned to the shore, my skin was gone.
She never came back. Not that day. Not the next. Not ever.
That was a year ago. And today, I found my skin lying in the very place I had left it a year ago.
2 of Spades: Since I could no longer return to the ocean, I had no way to find food. I had gathered some money left behind by people on the beach, but it wasn’t enough to sustain me forever. I needed a job.
Finding work was difficult when I had no experience in the human world, but eventually, I managed to become a waitress at a tavern. It was… interesting. Beyond the obvious experience of serving a wide range of customers, the hardest part was realizing that I had become part of an endless cycle of labor. The weight of it—the idea that this job, this routine of working from 3 to 12, Tuesday to Sunday, could stretch on until the end of my life—filled me with dread.
I pitied humans, trapped in this wheel of work for years, for decades. If I had never lost my skin, I think I would have chosen to experience human labor voluntarily, if only to understand the depth of that despair.
4 of Hearts: How did losing your seal skin affect your connection to your family?
The hardest part was being unable to see my family in the ocean. Not all seals are born as selkies, so I could only meet them at the shore. But now, even that was impossible. I could no longer sleep on the sand—the cold wind no longer welcomed me; it only made my bones ache.
2 of Clubs: Did you ever witness cruelty in others and feel powerless to stop it?
I saw a debtor being chased down by collectors—how ruthlessly they took him to the ground, and afterward, how they drank with the very interest they had stripped from him. I wondered how it had begun for him, how misfortune had spiraled until he could no longer escape it. What had made him borrow someone else’s money? What had made him unable to repay it? And what made it acceptable for lenders to exploit treaties and societal rules to take more than was ever fair?
It made me think about money—how scarce food must be for humans that they need currency just to continue their miserable existence.
And as I witnessed this cruelty, I thought of her. Had she gone through something like this? No—I doubted it. She wouldn’t have had a reason to be bullied. It couldn’t have been about money. But cruelty doesn’t need a reason. It simply exists, driving some to the edge—until there is nowhere left to go but the end.
10 of Diamonds: Now that you have found your skin again, is your journey over—or has it just begun?
I wonder how my skin found its way back to me. I want to believe that she traveled the world, that she filled her heart with all it longed for, and then, with renewed hope, chose to return it to me. But I shake my head. No. In the year I have spent here, I have seen everything—everything but hope.
Long ago, I heard the story of Pandora’s Box. That when it was opened, all the curses and calamities of the world were unleashed upon mankind, and only hope remained inside when Pandora hastily shut the lid. People say this is a lesson —that no matter how much suffering befalls us, we endure because of the hope we keep locked away.
But I see it differently. Hope was never released to bless mankind. It is still trapped inside the box, sealed away since the beginning.
I can only assume that at the end of her journey, the girl gave herself to the ocean —and the tide, in turn, carried my skin back to me.
Queen of Hearts
I am ready to don my skin again and leave the land behind. I taste the salt of the ocean as I return to my home.
I hope to feel the water embrace me once more, to let it wash away the weight of my time on land. I hope the currents will remember me, that they will guide me back to where I belong. I wonder if my family will still recognize me or if I have been away too long —if the scent of the shore, the heaviness of human life, still lingers on me.
As I step into the waves, my heart wavers for only a moment. The girl is gone, and I will never know if she found peace. But I will carry her memory with me.
The water rises to my chest, to my throat, until I am submerged. My body shifts, the familiar form of my true self returning as the sea welcomes me home.
I dive deep, leaving the land behind.
Review
I played a quick As Soft As You Remember by Beating The Binary. Actually, I didn’t expect to reach the Heart of Queen this quickly, but it came sooner than I thought. The mechanics were really cool, especially the soft skin and the salty snack —which, unsurprisingly, didn’t last until the end of the game because I ate them all during my playthrough.