The Language of Water

The language of water. A language of nuance, dense with urgency and supple desire. A short fiction.

There is something outside pressing the windows, aching to enter. It has allure but I don’t relent. Nevertheless, it impinges on my space. The little room feels smaller than usual.

Maybe it is the noise. Tap. Tap. Tap. A thousand, million taps at once. The language of water. A language of nuance, dense with taps of urgency and supple desire.

It fills the air, inside, it seems distilled. Heavy. Hanging. I wave my hand and feel resistance.

The wood of the sill is cool and clammy, the paint will rub off if I press too hard. Maybe I should, maybe if I put my nail just here, I could pull back a corner, slowly. Will it peel off all the way to the bottom? No, there it broke. The paint is quite damp, soaked by the surfacing of what it hides?

I am curious.

There is also moisture caught in the double glazing, trapped forever. Like frozen water in a glacier, cradling the past with unchanging permanence. That supple but trapped desire. Activated in the sun, diminished in the cold. It bubbles against the glass and leers longingly as the outside swims in clear, tepid streams through the crenelated earth.

I am attentive.

The view is murky, depth is tricky. I can barely see the asphodels. The little vestals bob under the pressure. Movement owing to Orpheus? They dance with desire, wanting something unimagined. Lightly tapping the ground, caught in water that runs over limestone to grow and grow until it becomes the sea and is seized and shoved by the moon.

I am open.

Water never stops moving, singing, cooing. There is a comfort in that certainty, though it is reckless. It lulls and screams, faltering at times, belligerent at others. I cannot but hear it.

I wrap myself in the language. Wrap myself in syncopated sound, wrap myself in the needy cold. Wrap myself in my own breath’s moisture, which has nowhere to go.

The room expands during this, its apotheosis. I feel undulations, rising and falling with the rhythmic pounding, stretching me to the tips, bursting with sound.

Without desire, there is no satisfaction. That longing, that movement, that language which coos and calls; it never stops, nor breaks, it never stops beckoning.

The language of water. Today, it’s a song. The parturition of life.

I deceive myself no longer.

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