Water's Fine
A conversation carried across memories of temperature.
Ooh, it’s chilly. I have goosebumps, and hey! So do you. The cold feels like collisions of galaxies in the spinal cord, sending signals to muscles and joints. They cry out for memories of gravel shorelines on a man-made lake. My second-cousin’s big annual picnic, to be exact. The most exciting day of the year! Summer is still young, and I feel free dunking my head into the murky water, dropping my blue goggles along the way. My dear friend, whom I only met thrice, dons her pink goggles and retrieves them for me.
It is as though the sun never quite breaks through here, the trees always holding back light. Skin reacts into an extra sense, and blood makes insecure comparisons to the temperatures of everything else. For a moment, I think I could be anyone or anything as the chill settles into the background and mud squeezes my toes. Maybe this is the water I would be baptized in if I weren’t already saved. It’s a world of difference from the drops flicked on my forehead as an infant. And right on cue—I’m back in the Poconos with a lively relative who has since passed away. My famed memory of her: observing me and my brother watching The Tom Green Show in a tiny hotel room packed with family. A place that lives in the recesses of my mind like a crowded slumber party. To get some space, a few of us rushed to the hot tub as warm raindrops fell on our heads. We sank into the steaming basin, giving way to that slow, quiet conversation with calm muscles that busy people spend their whole lives trying to carve out. Teenage girls hung around while I wallflowered, realizing for the first time that I could relinquish control and just watch myself. Relaxation is possible, even if it takes a little force.
I’ll be cold again, but the adrenaline warms me more than the shallow end ever could. I stand above the water, picturing my friends as I dive down the swirly yellow slide on my belly, only to be swallowed whole by a sudden flood. Everyone is waiting on the sand-less shore or in the belly of the beast, waving me in. The smell of the water tells me there are no sharks, but there’s still something almost macabre about it. I dial back my senses, imagining goofy catfish monsters with pokey whiskers. I pinch my eyes shut, afraid to look, but unable to imagine taking the plunge blind.
The motivation to hold back dissolves like a bowl of jelly. Chilled in the fridge, or ripped apart by a zip, zap, zoop of the tongue! A universe of stillness born entirely from thinking about warm suspension. Water has held each memory, living through them all this time. It already knows everything I’m ever going to do anyway, so there’s no reason to be afraid.
“The water’s fine!”
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/john-zerzan-the-sea