WATERBORNE
Water is sticky. Water is elastic.
Cells in our human bodies are flooded with H2O. For every two hydrogen atoms one oxygen atom completes each water molecule within our being. Our waterbodies are busy with regulating temperature, transporting nutrients, and facilitating chemical reactions.
Our bodies are saturated. Water dominates the brain, heart, and lungs. More than half our skin is water. Even bones are nearly a third water content. We are organs and we are molecules and we are chemical reactions because we are water and water is sticky. It clings to life and life clings to it and we exist because we are water.
*
Twenty-five years have passed since I last set foot on this lake beach. This waterfront where girls change in the backseats of cars, oftentimes to remove saturated swimwear and sometimes when uninvited hands seek out wet skin.
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Water is sticky. Water clings to and ushers nutrients head to toe, transports life under the surface of our skin, soaks into our skin, is more than half of what makes up our skin. We are water, are waterborne beings, are beings born of water.
*
I wonder if our bodies carry trauma because we are water and water carries memory. Our cells carry memory, replicating themselves and producing new cells formed from a template. If the template holds trauma, how can replication not carry trauma forward in perpetuity.
I am water and I carry water with me. I carry memory with water as much as water carries me.
*
Water is elastic. The surface of water is different than water below. Water against air creates a surface tension, a stronger bond between water molecules exposed to external elements. With this surface tension, leaves and twigs and bugs float atop the surface, too light to break through bonded molecules
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If all bodies are water, why do some sink while others float along the surface? Why do some float along the elastic layer of molecules while others drown deep within. How can an outstretched hand not save another from submersion?
*
I hear his repetition, “you scared me, you scared me,” decades after I resurfaced. He remembers tension. Memory is fluid.
I was born a waterbody, only fully alive when immersed within water. I floated atop surface tension, submerged below to swallow myself inward, swallow scattered soundwaves, resurfaced to reclaim oxygen.
I still float to the top. I still float atop tension.
*
Our bodies are saturated. We are water and we are air and we are blood and we are bone. Water and air are in our blood, are in our bones. Plasma is ninety percent water. Healthy bodies are oxygen saturated. Healthy bodies are water saturated.
*
She said “you will learn,” even while she had trouble floating herself. I spent hours and days and weeks and summers and years floating atop surface tension, submerging below the surface, resurfacing to swallow air and water in timed gulps.
Water is fluid and memory is fluid and I am not being fair.
*
Water is sticky. Water is elastic.
I would hold her hand and reach for her hand and push her toward the surface. “Stand up,” I would say. Below the surface was solid ground. The water never seemed that deep. “Stand up.”
She would gulp and she would gasp and she would fight and she would pull my hand, pull my body, bring my body below the surface, submerge me below the surface, submerge me because she could not surface. She was below the surface tension. She was swallowed whole by tension.
“I can’t,” she would say. “I can’t,” she would say while gulping air and gasping water even while steadying her feet.
*
Memory is sticky. Memory is elastic.
Our bodies are saturated. Water dominates the brain, heart, and lungs. If all bodies are water, why do some sink while others float along the surface?
Water is sticky. Water is elastic. The surface of water is different than water below.
I slip below the surface and swallow myself inward and shout in soundwaves the water swallows whole. I shout and scream below the surface and water swallows sound and waves send me to the surface.
I float to the surface. I float atop tension.
Lori A. May is the author of The Write Crowd: Literary Citizenship and the Writing Life (Bloomsbury). Her work may be found in publications including The Atlantic, Brevity, Midwestern Gothic, and Writer’s Digest. Lori teaches in the MFA program at the University of King’s College-Halifax. She is currently at work on an essay collection.