and the waters flow ever onward

hello, again. for a while now, things have been a nauseating combination of too fast and too slow, these past few months slipping past with molasses minutes but sand-through-fingers days. i've never been good at keeping a calendar, but it feels like these days don't fit so well into neat, numbered squares.

i've long believed that chaos is a dominating force in my life, some blood-curse started when, as a child, i lived in the liminal world of the riverbank. i joke often that i earned my sea-legs before my land-legs; the ever-shifting waters of the connecticut river lay claim to me before anything else had a chance to make its mark. it's half true, anyway - my earliest memories are of the water. lately, i've been dreaming about drowning.

i always make myself a cup of coffee when i wake up. alarm, the long journey from bed to kitchen, water, grounds, wait. it's a routine i've carried with me through many years & many kitchens. it's familiar. calming. i didn't own a coffee pot for three weeks after i moved & i drifted through the days unmoored, dreamlike. i make the same cup of coffee every morning, fall asleep on the same pillow each night. i cried when i bought a new mattress and had to buy new sheets. i'm a person that settles into stability like an old coat, but when things go unchanged for too long i get antsy.

i had a philosophy professor my first semester at college that argued nothing could ever be the same. nothing is left untouched by time's slow march forward, no hands nor hearts the same one second to the next. after all, the most life-changing things always seem to happen in the space between one breath and another. the phone rings, you turn the corner, the world falls out from beneath you. that moment toeing the line between exaltation and pure terror like nothing else, not even the pause at the top of the first rollercoaster you ever rode. it's the moment the water closes over your head and the world disappears.

i wasn't baptized in any traditional sense. that isn't to say, though, i didn't have that moment as a small child where the water swallowed me whole and, for a heartbeat, an overwhelming calm spread through me before the panic kicked in. a beach on fire island, the connecticut river, the lake at the bottom of my childhood hill, even the swimming pool at an aunt's house i barely remember - those waters all dug fingers into me and pulled. i suppose it's all the same in the end, that experience of godliness right before fear takes over. it's been many years since i almost drowned. i'm overdue for a swim.

a river is the metaphor my professor used to make her point about things being ever-changing. if the water's always flowing, never the same collection of molecules in the exact same order, how could a river ever truly be the same one second to the next? maybe it's that feeling i'm chasing when i fling myself into the tides of fate and tell them, do with me what you will. it's the same when i lay in bed after a long day at the beach, skin smelling of salt and sun, and feel the waves still rolling over my body. their impersonal push-pull lulls me to sleep and in my dreams, my skin melts from my bones. i'm scattered to the corners of all the oceans and seas of the world and no part of me remains, same as a river is called the same name but is never the same thing twice.

when caught in a rip current, you have two choices. the first is to swim, as hard as you can, parallel to the shore. this isn't recommended for anyone but the surest of swimmers, because it exhausts you quickly. after that, you're glossy-eyed, head tilted back, unable to keep yourself up long enough to breathe. it takes less than sixty seconds to drown.

the second choice, then, is to relax and let the current carry you. it takes much less energy to float, and rips are circular: eventually, the waves will carry you back to shore. of course, this is much harder than it sounds. when you find yourself being dragged away by a current, suddenly reminded that the ocean is large and fearsome and merciless, survival instinct calls like a foghorn in your chest to start swimming as hard as you can. to abandon that instinct, to let yourself relax into the embrace of the water, is a monumental overcoming. not so unlike getting caught up in the ever-changing chaos of life, i think, and deciding not to live in fear its happenings.

i am the child of a sailor and the water is in my blood. i was taught a healthy fear of the ocean, to watch for red skies in the morning, and that fish-scale clouds mean a storm is rolling in. these things, like swimming, have become second-nature in my many years on riverbanks and beaches and lakefronts. yet, i never quite was able to break that instinctual panic for air, even as life's rip current of chaos has become familiar to me from many years of its fickle company. i have always been a pair of scared hands hurting for driftwood to cling to, always striking out to find a constant to keep by my side. i've exhausted myself swimming, so perhaps it is time to try something new.

i have learned recently that not just is the free-flowing water ever-changing, but so are the hands trying desperately to cup a mouthful from the stream. i think there is some quiet comfort in letting the current sweep me away.

published september 7, 2020

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