Water Lasting For Hours
Words: Plum Luard
December 8, 2023
My desk faces a barred window. The paint is peeling. Scraggly vines that have not yet emerged from a winter slumber peer at the paines. A boy wearing yellow rain boots wields a purple headed hose with abandon. He squeaks and seems surprised whenever a drop grazes his shirt despite the fact that the hose is aimed directly at him. Water confuses and confounds yet we cherish it.
Toni Morrison’s Hagar was killed by “water that lasted for hours.” She was in love. And frantic and frenzied—that type of wild craziness that eats away. Corrosive. Debilitating. But glorious in all its destruction. It was a wet rainy night. She was toting bags of clothing and makeup and hair products. The bags grew heavy with all the water that flooded the sky. She dragged them along until they ripped and all her new beautiful dresses fell to the mercy of the rain-soaked street. She grabbed the sopping handfuls of fabric and ran home with running makeup and died two days later. Morrison writes that her killer was “water that lasted for hours.”
This line haunts me. That the water of one’s own body could murder. An image of the weight of the world. Weight we tote along even as it drags us. Sopping and soaking and sloshing.
Water moved the Sunday start time of Spring Weekend up two hours. Beads of water balancing on strands of hair gave off an aura that the entire crowd had gone gray. Lighters sparked and sputtered against the fat drops. Joints lit under tents made shift by rain ponchos melted plastic. Runny black makeup. Soaked sequins. Water crept up the legs of baggy jeans and ombred the denim. Water found its way into the choices of the artists, as well. Ethen Cain projected a video of toes dipping into a running creek with wafting wisps of strawberry blond hair. Remi Wolf swam clad in a white water-logged dress and strings of beads blowing bubbles. We love water. We love how it plays with our bodies—frigid toes and flowing through gowns. We lose ourselves.
The grass of the Main Green was all muddy and torn up from stamping, dancing boots which lined the Keeney halls for hours following. Hundreds of shoes left out to dry caked. The rain grew heavier and the drops fatter as Remi left the stage and shrieks and shouts erupted. Everyone soaked through. Whipping out their phones with water seeping into the battery to document the final moments of frantic dancing. DPS began funneling students off the Green. A few students began to cartwheel through a pool of mud and the rest rung around them in a giddy circle to watch. Mud sliding now. Full body thrown into it. Mud-caked hair and fingernails and silk. We funneled through the gates and jumped in puddles and rolled in more mud.
Finals commenced the following week and the libraries were overrun with piles of tissues and raucous coughs and raspy whispers. Spring weekend fever in full fledge. Water lasting for hours.
Freud wrote of the “oceanic feeling”—a term which refers to being overcome with this sensation of eternity. The idea is so illustrative that the term has come to bear the weight of many song titles. Lorde sings of water that holds her while dancing on a floating raft in the glistening water of a hidden New Zealand beach. Molly Lewis whistles and attempts to grasp a strand of this ecstasy. Freud explains that the “oceanic feeling” encapsulates this return to the consciousness of an infant—a state in which body is undifferentiable from outside world. Music too holds all this power of the oceanic feeling—this assurance that we are not alone. The permission to explore our bodies and minds and world in all its wilds. We run to water. This magical contraption. Weightlessness and whimsy and wonder.
Water rolls. We love its constancy. Perpetual. Cyclical. Unbroken yet breaks so beautifully. Water ebbs and flows with the world. Water promises us this persistence. That we continue to move. Lasting for hours. That we could dance for hours too, maybe. And then erupt in a cacophony of roaring coughs.