The Water Cure

by Sophie Mackintosh

STRONG FEELINGS WEAKEN you, open up your body like a wound. It takes vigilance and regular therapies to hold them at bay. Over the years we have learned how to dampen them down, how to practise and release emotion under strict conditions only, how to own our pain. I can cough it into muslin, trap it as bubbles under the water, let it from my very blood.

“Thinking yourself uniquely terrible is its own form of narcissism,”

TRAUMA IS A toxin that hooks into our hair and organs and blood and becomes part of us, the way heavy metals do, our bodies nothing more than a layering of flesh around everything ingested and experienced.

Sometimes I imagine the death of my sisters, the image of them standing against the rails on the terrace and paper-crumpling down to the ground, one by one, and then the tears come even when I remind myself that they are still alive. It’s important, the knowledge that things could always be worse. Imagining them gone makes the edges of my love sharper. In those moments I almost understand what they mean to me.

Every time I think I am very lonely, it becomes bleaker and more true. You can think things into being. You can dwell them up from the ground.

Absorbing the guilt and the sorrow is something the world expects of women.

It also taught me that loss is a thing that builds around you. That what feels like safety is often just absence of current harm, and those two things are not the same.

I did not want her to be a fellow woman. Sometimes she was my enemy and sometimes she was just my mother, an enemy in a different way.

Lia was the only one who was not afraid. Or more accurately, she was a person made brave, made desperate, by necessity, and finally I can understand this.

Refrain of the man, universal: This is not my fault! See also: I absolve myself of responsibility. And: I never said that. You can’t take the actions of my body as words.

Sudden love, when gifted to a habitually unloved person, can induce nausea. It can become a thing you would claw and debase yourself for. It is necessary to wean yourself on to it, small portions. I doubt very much Lia has been doing so.

But then isn’t that always like a woman, to want to drag every word and sentiment over and over through the wringer, until the meaning is gone. To over-process. To be absolutely sure.