Thinking

I was thinking about water. Then it was cold and far, salted to a degree I couldn’t measure. I realized measuring was not required.

It was not wet, but it was liquid. A grayish bluish emerald that wasn’t quite mineral and did not think much, at least in the beginning. Water is more, too.

This time it was, I think, the color of tears, which if you think about it, have many invisibilities, all of them there to hold, although they want to trickle through fingers. I tried to catch the molecules, but they were nothing but formulas, all numbers stuck to letters without words. The numbers would not stick to my palms, only slide past them, running from my eyes, wanting to understand. All that remained were my thoughts of what had gone, what had been wanted so much.

Or maybe I did not want to understand. Maybe my eyes just wanted to hold the water, admire its transparent taste of rain and sweat. Wanted to, but seemingly had failed. Water ran away, left me. I couldn’t let it go, however.

I kept thinking of saturation points, trying to recall what they were and still hating chemistry because the numbers had always burned my skin raw and made me sad. Water was where I went when this happened. Something would always fan the flames until I knew I was at least as good as Dante and could find a thread for wandering the labyrinth that never had a name. 

Who am I? I have no name but pool or lagoon or perhaps Ophelia. I don’t think about her, though, because she is not water and I dare not drown in her. We would be so lonely. The water would not comfort us then, no matter how much time we spent thinking about it. Water is perfectly fine, but the eely grasses alongside arms and thighs cause much discomfort.

Water is the only thing I dare think about sometimes, but it often forgets me, has no time for me. It keeps going, and I scramble to keep up with it, ignoring the scratches and bruises that occur in the process. These things are so superficial. Dante thought more deeply, and I could follow him if I could find him. I don’t know if he saw the five river fingers that ran like hands

Litovchenko saw the Styx and Charon on the ferry and the proof is in his work. But Styx of the Lovely Name is more than a river in a painting. More than a marsh in the center of Hades. More than a nymph or a goddess from Antiquity. Still, if I had a cat I would name it Styx because that name is unlike any other. It is neither male nor female, neither right nor wrong. It ends in a letter that is like two bridges crossing.

Except, I think now, there is Lethe, also wet and molecular and telling its mythology to those who will listen. I think listening is good. In fact, at this very moment there is a trickling nearby but just out of reach. It is certainly not coming from a faucet, because there is no house here, and the watery sound cannot be turned off and on. It makes me think of a ticking clock. Repetitive sounds disrupt me to an extreme I won’t reveal. Even water, if dripping, is not possible. Not for me. If I wanted to be funny, I’d say I’d rather drown. Except I’ve already hinted at that, it seems.

I am thinking about a big bed of water now, but it is one that is not for sleeping or suicide (even if I might be Ophelia). It is a river bed, but not Greek or Roman, and it moves on, slamming its shores into my memory until it hurts to stretch that far and there is no bridge long enough. I have forgotten the name of this giant waterland, the one I once had, and must console myself with those invented by myth and verse.

Thinking about water is something I often do unconsciously, not realizing it is on or in my mind until it is out of my grasp. Let me explain. I notice water’s absence in a cement city in the middle of a steppe, so dry that everything is a bone. So dry that there are no drops to moisten grass of any kind. So parched that I lick my lips and salt crystals whose molecular formula I don’t know and never will scatter on my lap. I run from these places, including Madrid, where no moss or lichens can survive on old stone walls. Mausoleum.

I am always, you see, thinking about water because without it there is nowhere to float and veins run as dry as the placer deposits in western regions of a land whose name I cannot recall. Lethe may have helped me to forget the dry, as they say in Australia. Except drought ends the forgetting and leaves nothing behind. Nothing is not much if it is all one has. Desert starts with d and e.

Water is where I think best, maybe the only place I can think, or dare to. It has waves and ripples and all those tears and its current is irresistible. Water makes the skin wrinkle up so much we don’t know if we’re a newborn or a raisiny elder. The ambiguity is exhilarating, at least to me. It suggests the possibility of going backward in time to before we can remember, before we are born, still floating. 

I imagine Styx, Lethe, Acheron, Cocytus, Phlegethon and see how they are definitely five fingers to a body with a mind that longs not to recall a single drop of life for fear of weeping to death. That is why Cocytus wails and laments, why Phlegethon burns with the desire to arrive at that place where nothing resides and everything flows, endlessly. If possible, I would leave Acheron to its woeful state and save my pity for the tears falling through my own fingers, dripping and twisting from my two wrists, but still salvageable. Hades is fortunate to receive all five, nevertheless.

I say salvageable because the tears might still water a small herb patch or help a sunflower sprout. They might show the brook out back where it could meander. A whole new crop of swamp milkweed might emerge if the little stream changed its course. There are no numbers in that, only hope. Atoms of hope that water will never die.

I say hope because there’s a resemblance between hope and water. There is hope (and more) in the mni wičoni of the Lakota of Standing Rock whom the good President ignored. The Lakota and other mindful persons know water is life. I like to think my fondness for streams, seas, ponds, and such means I understand, just a little.

I think everyone needs to see the colors of water, the icy burn of the Atlantic’s January waves, the fragile necessity of tears. Everyone needs to see that thoughts really do count.