In my youth when hangovers were events, day-destroying
crises on...
In my youth when hangovers were events, day-destroying
crises on a soul and cellular level, what I most craved was putting my body in
water. It was not greasy food or another drink. Hangovers made me want to be
swimming. I’m not a great swimmer, but there’s little I like more than being in
water, diving around, blasting up off the bottom where it’s cold through the
surface into the air, floating so it’s just the water and the sky and me in
between, moving my body horizontally which is a little like flying. The thing I
like most about it is the giving my weight to it, surrendering to it, a
simultaneous being held and the possibility of drowning. That’s what I wanted
when a long night drinking peeled the layers back to my lizard brain, when all
the edges were jagged, each nerve-ending sizzling with cosmic static.
And that’s what I’ve been wanting these days, unhungover,
but peeled open. Along the Charles River late this afternoon, a shell of ice
covered the river, strong enough for geese to stand on. It reflected the
setting sun, glowed pink, lavender, gold, so many greys and blues. I thought
about the water underneath. The stillness atop, the movement below. I had
regular, predictable thoughts about how things move and shift and how sometimes
you know exactly what will happen, and it does, but that does not mean you know
what might happen after that. I thought about how much I wanted to give my
weight to water, to smooth the edges, to give bath to those layers that are not
so often accessed. “The swimmer lets himself fall out of the day heat and down
through a gold bath of light deepening and cooling into thousands of evenings,
thousands of Augusts, thousands of human sleeps,” writes Anne Carson in Plainwater. Those evenings, Augusts,
human sleeps, this is the condition I crave. The abandoning of thought, the losing
oneself, and the simultaneous staying whole. “How slow is the slow trance of
wisdom, which the swimmer swims into.” That slow trance, that gaining, that relief.
[Painting by Leanne Shapton from Swimming Studies]
