Water is Cruel until I Float JoliAmour DuBose-Morris

Water is Cruel

Here are three things. When I was twelve, I went camping with my cousins in Philadelphia. To float means to be suspended in water, or to come into your mind or to simply fluctuate in value. Summer is near.

My first time being taught how to float was by an older woman at the campsite who held me on the blanket of a small fear that I have, or well two that I have; water and the loss of control. She told my cousins and I how floating saved her life. When she was in her twenties, there was a large storm (or tsunami, the specifics are unprecedented) that succumbed her into the ocean and a technique she learned (the very one keeping me still) was the serendipity to her life-or-death circumference.

“Learn to float and you will never drown.” The best place to practice this is in a feet by feet pool so that when you close your eyes and give your body to God, the furthest one can go is really nowhere. When water has no reckoned force against it, it runs and it runs. “Is water wet?” We ask each other in grade school, a debate to pardon with how we perceive things that will exist and have existed before us and simply after us.

Everyday, we imagine that something larger than us by power structure or “it is what it is,” can take away our control. Every time I’ve tried to float, I feel this slip of relief and then I am pummeled into this fear that tells me “it is too good to be true, water is cruel.” So, I’m standing up.

If a plastic water bottle gives its gravity to the sea, knowing that it is just a rejected piece of loiter yet never sinks, what does it say to the people existing on Earth with 60% of themselves being fluid? Water is a family relation. Why is it when given facts about life to ooze those anxieties that we cannot control, we choose that grain in the sand that tells us otherwise? Can’t we simply just come and go, along with our favorites and our worsts? They become us more than water. Is it just me or do I remember my summer’s more coherently? A blaq child’s summer, our salvation was chlorine and ninja turtle floatees. Dollar store goggles (preferably the ones that came with a cover for the nose) and floral bathing suits from TJ Maxx. The division between some of us and the rest was that either our first swimming experiences were being thrown into the deep end by Grandpa or being given floatees to manage the unknowing. It’s interesting that those floatees just sustain fears, they never solve them. Why do I feel like I grew the most during the summer than any other time that the sun occurred? It rises every day, what makes these months so different? Is it because they slip away so easily? All of my winter dreams are about sand as if I never (when the time is near) resent the feeling of it’s warmth pressed into my soles. But do I hate the sweat residing in between my toes when Summer has not happened yet?

When it snows I just wish for one moment to lay my hand out the window, clutching wind and feeling it leave my palms before I even close them. We all can describe the warmth of sitting in a backseat with our shoes off and our worries low. And then that calamity becomes redundant so we wish for jackets and to see the friends we usually never see. To make snow angels as we feel untouchable against the tiny speck of water driving into the ground turning everything white. But we don’t always love that either.

So then what do we love? An older woman loves to float because it saved her life, I love the memories I’ll never touch again, and some of us wish to be unhappy because happiness is temporary and disappointing.

Like when the leaves finally turn brown. Or when leaving the window down during an August car ride makes the seats a bit rigid. When do we just learn to fluctuate like seasons do and love things as they come while loving things as they go? When do we learn to just be within those currents?

until I Float

cause of death: summer, control, floating

JoliAmour DuBose-Morris