Juliet with eyes closed from pleasure was slowly sucking up chocolate milkshake through a plastic straw. She wore an elegant evening dress that made her slender body look attractive. A bangle butterfly bracelet surrounded one of her thin wrists. Juan stood beside her, feeling how his arms were sweating, even though it was a warm summer evening. The young pair was on the pier Torpedo Wharf facing the Golden Gate Bridge lit up with torches.

‘The water is so mysterious. When I was a little girl, I wished to become a mermaid,’ Juliet whispered.

‘You’re like a mermaid,’ Juan said, and the pace of his heart beat sped up when he looked at her…

In the Pacific Ocean, miles away from the place where the couple’s feet touched the ground, a young pilot whale was suffocating and swimming with great difficulty. He was starving but could not eat because his stomach was full of plastic mistaken for food that has not digested. It was hard for him to breath; he lost his pod; he was lonely.

‘May I call you… my mermaid?’ Juan asked in a quiet voice that was nevertheless thick with emotion. Juliet turned to face him, and he saw her wide smile.

‘Of course,’ she replied. Juan, feeling blithe about the beginning of “forever together”, embraced her graceful waist. 

The pilot whale gave up the struggle and let the ocean current to carry him; his heart pulsing slower and slower…

Juan and Juliet’s lips started getting closer. Due to an impulse, Juliet’s hand that was holding the now empty plastic cup let it go. Both her arms passionately wrapped around Juan’s neck. The cup fell into the “mysterious” waters of San-Francisco Bay.

The sunset was reflecting in the opened but motionless eyes of the pilot whale as his now dead body was floating on the surface in solitude. 

The black butterfly that was attached to Juliet’s bracelet suddenly came to life, flapped its wings and raised in the air unnoticed because the only pair of eyes that could have seen it was closed due to a flame of passion ignited by the kiss. The perturbations that the butterfly produced pushed the cup further into the ocean…