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. Iâm not a great swimmer, but thereâs little I like more than being in water, diving around, blasting up off the bottom where itâs cold through the surface into the air, floating so itâs 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. Thatâs 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 thatâs what Iâve 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. âThe 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,â 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. âHow slow is the slow trance of wisdom, which the swimmer swims into.â That slow trance, that gaining, that relief.
