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Grieving Alongside Water
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You think you know what crying is. You think it's water from your eyes, a tremor in your voice, a hitch in your breath. That's not crying. That’s a leak. That’s a controlled demolition. I'm talking about the flood. I'm talking about the architectural failure of the whole damn building.
It happened in the shower. The shower is a good place for it. The sound of the water is a roar that promises to swallow any other sound you might make. It’s a temporary privacy cloak woven from white noise.
The water was hot, a sheet of tiny, stinging impacts against my back and shoulders. At first, it was just water. And then, it wasn't. Each drop became a point of pressure. A tiny, insistent finger tapping on a bruise. _Tap. You are alone. Tap. You are a failure. Tap. No one is coming. Tap. Tap. Tap._
The feeling started not in my head, but in my chest. A physical object. A cold, heavy stone being lowered into my ribcage. It was dense, a knot of old ice and compressed gravity. The hot water sluiced over my skin, but it couldn't touch the coldness of that stone. It was a geological cold. A cold from the planet’s core.
My breathing changed. I was no longer pulling in air. The stone was taking up too much room. I was getting whatever was left over, thin, useless sips. Then the first sob hit.
It was not a sound. It was a physical event. A violent, involuntary contraction of my diaphragm, a seismic lurch that shook my entire frame. My knees buckled. I braced myself against the tile wall. The tile was slick and cool, a shocking contrast to the heat of the water. My hand slid. My body followed. I ended up sitting on the floor of the tub, my back against the wall, the spray hammering down on my head and shoulders.
And now the tears came. But in the deluge of the shower, they had no meaning. They were just more water, joining the flood. I couldn't tell the difference between the hot water from the showerhead and the hot, salty water pouring from my own eyes. I was leaking from the inside out. My body’s boundary was dissolving.
The sobs were coming faster now, full-body spasms. They were ugly, guttural things, dredged up from the bottom of me. The sound was ripped from my throat, a raw, ragged noise like tearing fabric. It was the sound of a structure coming apart at the seams. I curled in on myself, my arms wrapped around my knees, trying to hold myself together as I was breaking apart.
The water was a constant, indifferent weight. It flattened my hair to my skull. It streamed into my open, sobbing mouth, and I tasted the salt of my own grief mixed with the flat, metallic taste of the city water supply. I was drowning and hydrating at the same time.
There are no thoughts in a moment like that. There is no 'why'. The 'why' is a luxury for later, for the quiet analysis in a dry room. In the flood, there is only the overwhelming sensory data of your own destruction. The roar of the water. The hammering pressure on your skull. The cold, unyielding tile beneath you. The stone in your chest. The raw, scraped feeling in your throat. The taste of salt and metal.
I don't know how long I sat there, a collapsed building in a rainstorm. But eventually, the sobs subsided into shudders. The stone in my chest didn't disappear, but it settled. The roar of the water slowly separated itself from the roar in my own head.
I was still a ruin. But the flood was receding. And I was left sitting in the wreckage, shivering, waterlogged, and terribly, terribly quiet.
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