The warm water overflowed. It seeped into the drain in the floor of the motel washroom as she stepped into the bath her lover had drawn for her. She felt a little unwell, but baths had always calmed her down, helped her feel weightless as her back floated above the rim of the tub, not quite making contact.
The day before, it had rained. They'd purchased an umbrella and had become lost, part of the throng of multi-coloured, spinning, dripping rain-gear, which possesses a certain beauty when it's observed from above street level. Down below, as part of the mass, clinging onto his damp arm, moist with sweat and rain, she'd felt completely submerged, swallowed, even, by the city, by the world, by her own thoughts. It made her temples hurt as she struggled to breathe, as she fought to keep her head above all this water, to keep from sinking like the stone it felt like she'd swallowed.
He knelt by the tub of water that had chilled significantly when her body, lithe and cool, had entered it. As he twirled her long, dark hair about his fingers, she told him something she'd read once about womb simulation—how if a tub of body temperature water were large enough to immerse you completely, to the point where you were just floating, it would be like being back inside your mother. You wouldn't know where your body ended and the water started. Isolated and drifting, you'd be recalling your original condition, somehow.
As she told him this, this bit of trivia, the source of which she couldn't remember, it struck her as mildly ironic that such serenity could come from being submerged, overwhelmed, led, even, by a force so much more powerful and so much more permanent and certain, than she, the self-proclaimed chaotic one.
As he leaned in to kiss her, biting her lower lip the way she liked it, she slid back slowly, holding her nose and clamping her eyes shut as she went under.
From beneath the bathwater, she opened her eyes and looked up at his rippled, wavy face and thought he'd said something, the way his mouth seemed to open, and how she caught a glimpse of his tongue, but she could hear nothing.
She imagined this as perfect numbness, like a sedative effect or an unbreakable fever, like trying to distinguish shapes through a haze. For a second, she thought it was beautiful, but as she re-emerged, coughing, the cold air hitting her neck and chest immediately, the thought disappeared in the hot-water fog. Leaning her arms against the rim of the bathtub, she sighed deeply, and looking into his eyes for just a second, suggested a hot shower instead.
The past few weeks have been difficult ones. Every day for the last nine or ten days now, I've woken up feeling as though my head were being grasped and cruelly squeezed. I haven't had headaches this terrible in nearly a decade. I've been taking (in addition to the Prozac) Motrin, Tylenol, Nyquil and whatever it is the Korean pharmacists give me when I tell them "Migraine." And, grimacing painfully, like a bad mime, I clutch my throbbing brain--to illustrate the severity--which I'm sure has split open and is slowly leaking into my sinuses. The veins in my temples pound and their movement are palpable as I sandwich my face between my hands. During the day, the pain and the pills put me close to falling asleep at my desk at work, while at night, despite my exhaustion, I wake up constantly, as it's unpleasant to sleep with a pulsating cranium.
I am making an effort to eat more protein during the week, as I thought at first the excruciating pain in my head and face might have to do with some sort of deficit in my diet. Regardless of my effort and the vitamin popping, I am still exhausted, still dizzy, Imagine a thumb tack being steadily filed down to the little colourful plastic halo that sticks out of the corkboard; that's how I feel. Soon, I may be utterly useless, which is sort of how I felt two weeks ago, when two friends commemorated a successful year in
That night, there were a lot of tears, none of which I felt responsible for, but which I felt a need to soak up, an urgent desire to stop. I've never been comfortable around crying. I myself am subject to it very rarely, but when it happens I exert every effort, every thought, to holding it back, to steeling my eyes and poker-facing it through the turbulence until my voice is steady and I can look up again, mascara intact, cheeks un-streaked by the little rivulets that strip one's face clean, vulnerable.
We stayed up all night and into the afternoon of the next day and the tears continued to flow as I bobbed along helplessly in this whirlpool of worry and despair and frustration and alcohol, which made drowning a little more tolerable. Despite a truly terrible morning, my friends managed to make it back across the Pacific Ocean (another significant accumulation of salt-water) and are in the
I remember learning in science class a long time ago about the water erosion of sedimentary rocks in river beds and how when you fish one out of a stream, it will most likely be perfectly smooth and even—the slow result of water pounding and rushing steadily over it, breaking it down, making it just right. I recall being very interested in this idea and how water is so responsible for shaping the world we currently know, a world that may have been very different before islands went under, and tectonic plates creaked away from each other as the oceans smashed up archipelagos and narrow land bridges holding on, staying connected by just a relatively tiny strand in the sea—a negligible prospect for permanency. I think my fascination in all this lies in the gradual, protracted sort of attribute of such enduring, results; how it's something that you can't notice happening, but will change you forever.
When I think about it deeper, in bed at night, or alone at my desk in school, I apply it to myself and grow extremely anxious and worried. How permanent my self-inflicted erosion must be; how steadily life has rushed above my head, like water, and kept me under, breaking me down in its quest to make me a little more perfect, a little more rounded and smooth: nice to look at, nice to touch, but not quite the same as I was, not the original person I might have been in a less turbulent, drier environment. I've lost a lot of myself, I think, before I even knew where I was and where I stood.
She had run through the woods that day, her birthday, trying desperately to find them, her invited guests. They had been playing Hide and Seek, you see, and she was 'It'. Special girl. In the February cold, she struggled to walk in her tight, bunched up snowsuit, the bottoms of which had frayed the year before and were becoming increasingly grey and she dragged her feet through the murky, brown sludge, a mixture of half-melted snow, mud and dog shit.
She could hear them giggling, these girls from her class to whom the swamp was foreign, the murkiness and mess of fallen branches a one-day affair. She knew they weren't far, just in the knocked down cabin she'd gotten in trouble for painting one year when she was much smaller, or behind the rusted out water tank behind the tree she spent most of her summers dangling her legs from, maybe.
Lifting her feet one at a time, she began to walk again, through the swamp, a place her mother had warned her about—a dangerous place to get lost in. The girl knew where she was—not far at all from the house. She could see her bedroom light (she often forgot to turn it off, which would make her father yell about the cost of electricity), so she wasn't scared.
As the minutes passed, it occurred to her that the giggling had stopped a while back, that there was no longer that thick sense of anticipation in being discovered, chased and tagged. She had stopped moving for five minutes at least, resenting having to search for people she didn't particularly like, anyway. She hadn't even wanted to be 'It.' They could come find her.
Angry thoughts rattled about her mind as she waited, sitting in the swamp murk, becoming greyer and greyer, her hot pink snow pants completely submerged in the muck, her boots soaked right through.
Days get dark quickly in February, as the sky starts off in grey scale to begin with. This said, within a half hour, when no one came to find her and the moon was visible, she decided she'd been "It" long enough and began to pry herself out of the sludge, though with some difficulty.
Later when they saw her clothes and asked her if she'd gotten lost, embarrassed at her behaviour, she told them "yeah," and played up how scary and terrible it was, realizing full well that foregoing solid ground and allowing herself to go under, had been her choice. Later, she told them that she'd accidentally tripped and fallen in.
On top of my current depression, I am having problems with my boss, who isn't paying me once again. This week I had a major confrontation with him and essentially told him that he was very incompetent and insensitive. I told him how it was hard enough to be isolated on the other side of the world without knowing the language; how hard it was to be stared at not only by the locals but my few co-workers, none of whom acknowledge my existence; how hard it all was and how everything was so much worse given that I have an employer who frequently lies and neglects my needs and contract clauses. I told him that if my money isn't in my account by the end of the week, I will not come back to work, because I'll be at the Ministry of Labour issuing a formal complaint. I am so tired of this. I have three more months in this country and I refuse to feel like a slave, which working for no money makes me, essentially.
My boss makes me feel so uncomfortable. Whenever I broach a subject to him, he cuts me off or lies, then bids me to follow him into a closed classroom where he starts up about the school's current economic situation, which I really couldn't care less about. I get paid once a month and nearly a quarter of it goes to my student loan (when I can afford it), the money for which, when he doesn't pay me, I am forced to use for necessities. Speaking to him Wednesday, I was very unwavering as I clutched my books to my torso, wanting so very badly to scream, or at the very least, look away. He just stood there in silence staring coolly at me, considering. Then, seeing that I wasn't about to move—I was quite petrified, in every sense of the word--or say anything more, he stormed out, slamming the classroom door behind him, Paaaff.
I exerted every last effort to not start crying and I didn't, but I came very close. While he was still there, staring, which those who know me realize I can barely tolerate in children let alone odious sweating men who stomp around the room to make their presence felt by those about them, slamming their hands down for dramatic effect, my voice broke once and horrified, I clutched my books tighter and stood standing motionless against the whiteboard for a full ten minutes until finally, I heard him close his office door behind him.
When I went home about an hour later, the ocean smashed into the archipelago, so to speak, snapping and destroying it permanently. I was amazed at the quantity of tears streaming from my face, how very miserable I was. It was a veritable deluge that sent my head into a terrible, unsteady spin-cycle. This is rare for me and I wasn't sure how I would ever manage to stop now that I'd finally managed to feel anything but arid apathy and annoyance.
Later, as the tears continued to roll, and I sat hunched over a my table, wholly unable to stop neither the steady streams of water running down my face nor the wracking pain in my chest, I thought of Alice in Wonderland and how she grew to an immense size (from drinking something suspect after her fall down the rabbit-hole), which of course, made her start crying. Maintaining proportion with the rest of her body, the huge tears splashed down and became an ocean, which, when she shrunk again nearly drowned her. It's interesting though, how Lewis Carrol suggests the possibility of drowning in one's own tears. Perhaps he's implying that the things we despair about are all of our own creation, how maybe there's something in our personalities that makes others react to us or treat us in a particular way.
It's also interesting that
Anyway, I'm officially on vacation as of tonight. I'm going to Jeju-do with John on Sunday night. I'll try to keep my head above water for another week at least.
