On My Father and Water

saltwater memory

The fabric of my father’s skin is something like leather and suede. Textured like the sea. When he moves, he resembles one of those flip-books with drawings that dance as you thumb through them. It animates him. Wrinkles in and out. Stretches. Brown like the base of a wooden drum. Like the hills of Egyptian desert he was born from. He looks like what he came from, a fulfillment of his genealogical destiny.

My father’s bones are dense with the rhythm of stories. He wears adrenaline well; with it cloaked over his too-broad shoulders. There live the memories of a scuba trip that brought him inches before the full-moon eye of a baby whale. Arms that became feathered when they gripped a hang glider’s feet, wind carrying his weight over the Chilean mountain range. Scalp prickling with terrifying wonder when a lion found him in the Kenyan savannah, a place where grass looks like tufts of graying hair patched over the ground. Where my father’s leather-suede hands gripped a camera with the might of God.

My father is a magician of nature because he understands its order and limits as a language in its own right. In my earliest memories of him, he is always barefoot, rooted to the earth as though he sprung right out of it.

Mountain man.

I’ve always known him to be a listener. Someone who unequivocally believes in the magic of stillness, in unwavering faith even when it may be unfounded, and immense gratitude for the natural world. So luckily, I was never the kind of child that spent much time indoors. My parents didn’t raise me that way: I was never propped in front of the television and I refused to sit still unless a book was in my hand. I was my happiest when splayed beneath the belly of a swollen sun. I chased lizards with cups in my backyard and paraded throughout my neighborhood in princess dresses.

It wasn’t the physical activity I was drawn to. In fact, I was never a “sport-ish” kid. You couldn’t pay me to dig my fingernails into dirt or sweat hard enough to feel salt prickle my eyes. The only grime on me was the sticky residue of my grandmother’s food, cous-cous plastered onto my chest like a locket. I was experimental with it in a way I still am. I sought after strange, unfamiliar textures to shovel into my mouth. Taste was my pathway to creativity.

So, I wasn’t outside because of this childlike urge to commune with the trees or discover insect colonies. And maybe, to my father’s chagrin, it wasn’t out of a premature search for connection. I think it was something far simpler than that: the scale of it all. How big the world seemed. The prospect of being the smallest thing in this universe of dangerously enormous bodies was thrilling. These impossible things to wrap my head around. Maybe, subconsciously, the challenge was stimulating.

And biggest of all – most bewildering and magical of all – was water.

I loved the water.

Here was this fluid, mercurial texture that passed through me like silk. It couldn’t break or blister or be destroyed. It just was. But never passively. It moved with force, with will. Viciously. The concept felt entirely alien and I was captivated by it in whatever capacity it came in: pools, lakes, puddles, cups. But mainly the sea. I loved how incomprehensibly large it was.

I never went too far from it. The water, I mean. I have my parents to blame for this, for their insistence on taking me to the ocean far before I could even develop formative memory. I could never understand my compulsion to be around it as I got older. I could only ever describe it as a magnetism. A natural place to return to. I may not remember those beautiful beginnings, but I feel them in my body. Like a birth. Like a homecoming.

I recently came across an old sepia stained photograph of me as a child hoisted on my father’s shoulders, the froth of waves cold and white behind him. He holds me upright with only the shelf of his palm. This was a time where my father let his hair grow long enough to sweep his shoulders. The color of this photo has faded, but you can still make out the tan we both wear like trophies.

And then there’s the small shape of me. All scrunched up and mighty.

The formative footsteps of my life happened on scorching Miami sand, a place I was lucky enough to spend most of my childhood in. My father tells this story of me often, not so much out of nostalgia, but pride. My first sense of connection, inspired by my own touch, happened in water.

He recalls not being surprised when I propped myself upright like a sapling and grew a daunting six inches. Here was his daughter…born from the earth just as he was. Barefoot as ever, unafraid like he’d always imagined she might be. I stomped right into the sea foam, nothing but small-girl ambition twisted on my face. No notion of danger to barricade me from its vastness. I was determined to enter its body of water. He says that when I inevitably tipped over, I beat my fists into the sand, like I was trying to pummel something out of the earth. And then I splayed my fingertips wide, scooped up the grainy texture of it in my hands, and pushed myself up again.

Now of course I don’t remember this, even though that aforementioned magnetism pulses in my chest whenever I revisit this story. But it sounds about right that the power of water is what motivated me to stand for the very first time. It resonates. Down to the beating of my fists. I think I was born incomprehensibly angry. Especially because as I got older, I grew to visit the ocean in times of anger and heartbreak. It was an echo-chamber: the only thing that would ever imitate the intensity of my rage. It was comforting, of course, to know something else could roar as loud as me. To know no judgment, just the familiarity of a temper.

It was at two years old that I discovered the wonder of chlorine for the first time. At the feet of my grandmother’s Greece-inspired Miami Beach condo, heat trapped beneath the polished cement, the urge to swim came very naturally to me. It seemed obvious that the spazzing of my limbs would carry me from one end of the pool to another: less like something to be learned and more like something born within me. An animal impulse to float, swim, flee. How true this would become. Buoyancy, it seemed, was my gift: it was easy in a way I later wished the things I loved could be.

My grandmother never entered the water, but she’d come downstairs and watch me swim, preparing myself to brave the ocean. She donned silver Baboush slippers and large round sunglasses that swallowed a third of her face. I held handstands under-water in an attempt to impress her. Pool water in my ears and fingers pruned like dates.

I can tell you where I find God. Or the universe. Or whatever name you choose.

In the impossible vastness we belong to.

It’s when I tilt my chin back and beat the sun. Breathe the salt. Sigh the wind. Embody some divine existence. When a violent warmth fills up this crater that lives inside me. A mouth gaping “o” between cracked lips, the eroding cavity where truth goes to die and these fictions are born. Inhaling resistance like I could get high on it. Like maybe it’ll immortalize me. When face and body and sins are cloaked in light and I am no longer beholden to the narrative of “grieving girl”. I am only alive. Brutally alive, singing the mother-hymn I know so well, trapped in this celestial shape before a pregnant ocean. I watch the geometry of a wave fold in on itself.

Patterns. Rotations. Wanting.