Rivers + Oceans + Rain
As a young person, I skinny-dipped at night in the South Toe River with all the Hellbenders. It was the first river I really knew. Terrifying: those fleshy, giant, river salamanders, but then someone told me their skin is so porous, so delicate, so sensitive to pollution, they can only live in the purest of waters, and that made me feel safe. It was like we knew a secret, the Hellbenders and me—that the Toe was the best water in the world. Once in the river, sliding my feet carefully over the smooth river stones, fearing the touch of something soft in the brown-dark of the water, even though I’m soft, I’m flesh. I learned the cold of this river.
You have to jump into the South Toe, you cannot wade in. Even in August, it’s so cold it knocks your breath out. Knowing a river is about knowing its lengths, its curves, its splits, its meets. I’m living near rivers again for the first time in a long time. A confluence, to be exact. In my twenties, I would hike up in Inwood Hill Park and watch the highest parts of the Hudson snaking between the cliffs. So many of the rivers in New York were harnessed with purpose; early America’s military strategic spaces, or economic meccas, they were quickly built upon. The South Toe had no battles, no capital: it was a wild river.
When I walk the confluence in the morning I try to look and see the exact spot where the Chenango and Susquehanna rivers meet. Can I see it? Can I perceive the moment they flow into one another? Each day my guess shifts slightly. Why do I care where they meet? Maybe because I’m obsessed with connection. I text my crush, also a water freak. “Maybe I’ll come visit your confluence,” he retorts. I moved in late July hoping the city was less addicted to lawn chemicals than the last place I lived. No such luck. Skulking around the neighborhood in summer heat I fumed at the poison warning signs on each lawn, warning humans and animals not to touch the lawn for 48-72 hours. The shortsightedness, the bullshit of it—but philosophically, something more bothers me: these people expect perfect growth, and there is no such thing. The mere act of growing invites decay, time, bugs, disease, death. It’s a risk to live, so risky, to survive we must be imperfect, though we are humiliated by our imperfections.
I feel this humiliation of imperfection the most when I want someone to want me. I am so flawed, can someone ever find joy or beauty in any part of me? Shame, shame, shame. I keep walking, feeling unworthy as I round each block. These chemically protected blades of grass aren’t even living fully. What is a life without piss, and bugs, and rot? Isn’t it our job to love despite imperfections? Let the rain wash away the lies and the pesticides. There’s no such thing as growing and being protected. You can grow or be protected, but not both. There’s no such thing as a connection without the risk of disconnection.
There’s no such thing as solitude without the threat of a bond. There is no such thing as water that’s not pulled and attracted to flow into and disappear into other water. Water is attracted to itself. Cohesion. Rain disappearing into rivers. Rivers flowing and meeting. Rivers emptying into vast oceans. Oceans are our first mothers. Rain the first daughters.
A while back my mother cut out an article and sent it to me. It was about how a woman refused to clean her home, her spaces, to an immaculate degree and how that was a kind of feminism. “I understand you more now,” she’d written at the top. Many of my fights with my mother growing up had to do with how clean I appeared, or how clean my room looked, or some kind of conforming act. Conforming is a kind of protection. I know this because I’ve seen people who conform to evade social ridicule and pain. The article stated that this woman refused the idea of appearing perfect because it was unjust to herself and betrayed her humanness, and all other women, and their humanness. The insistence that everything about us, and all our spaces be perfect, and not only that but to deny the labor involved becomes oppressive. “It was nothing,” “it was so easy,” I’ve heard myself and other women say when their labor is praised. Water running down windowpanes into puddles, into oceans. The trap of appearing perfect. The desire to appear perfect in order to be loved. But a woman does not have to be useful. She can just be.
My best friend and I swam in the Aegean sea one summer, the most ancient ocean I’ve been in. We floated way out beyond where we could no longer touch the ocean floor, beyond where anyone could see us, and we took off our bathing suits and just floated naked for a while. In that moment we just were. We were not useful. We were women in our twenties, bathing suits in hands letting the salt lap every part of us. Our existence in that moment, utterly useless. Pleasure only, and only for ourselves. It has been a struggle, a fight against a tide that always returns inside me and tells me as a woman: be useful, be useful, if you want love, be useful. I think of water, its power, how it comes in all forms, all shapes, and gives birth to so much life. I think of how we use it. How we see women like water, natural resources to harness, to divert for emotion, protection, cleanliness, domestic labor, comfort. How society won’t let a woman grow old, it rages that it cannot mine her anymore. How we try to resist age, to say beauty is useful and we retain it.
One of the most beautiful girls I’ve ever known was struck by lightning in a rainstorm while washing dishes in a metal sink just a mile away from the banks of the Toe River. I wasn’t there when it happened, but years later, we sat in a car together in a lightning storm by a movie theater and she started to shake with fear as all the hair on her body started rising. She told me when you get struck by lightning it actually changes your body’s polarity and that the old saying is actually wrong. If you’re struck by lightning once, you’re even more likely to be struck again. We locked all the doors and stayed in the car until the storm passed. I kept thinking the electricity was attracted to her, like everyone else. I told that lie for a long time. That people’s bodies change when they get struck by lightning. She was no longer like us water girls, she was now electric, all currents in her, now voltage, wattage, she was suddenly useful in a way I’d never seen. She was on an electrical path now. I really believed it because of what I saw with my own eyes, the storm conducting everything on her body calling her into the sky.
