metamorphosis

on water

Drip.
Drip.

Drip.

When exiting a pool, or finishing a shower, most people react to the cold, unfamiliar air by grabbing a towel to dry off.  They feel a familiar sense of comfort by wrapping the towel around their shivering bodies; the profound nature of nakedness is uncomfortable, as properly displayed by the downfall of Adam and Eve.

It almost feels unnatural to be wet, as if the water that was properly fine to soak in earlier is repulsive.  Sitting in the water yourself is fine; the water sitting on you back is not.  Perhaps it is because you don't recognize the water after time has passed to adapt to a new medium; the shower droplets become one droplet; you become the water.  Perhaps, realizing the water has been on you the entire time feels wrong or suffocating.  For whatever reason, you feel like snuffling the water out of your pores is the signification of completion. 

Suddenly, water becomes a toxic chemical.  If the water is still on you after a given point of time out of the source, you squeegee every single droplet of poison off of your skin until you can tell that you were never in it to begin with.  Your skin feels wrinkly because of the bloat happening under any surface level--anything you can touch, at least.  The water has infiltrated your body.  You, yourself are up to 60% water.  The human body has grown to be infiltrated with water.  You are water.  Water is not you.  You will never be all the water.

You stay dehydrated for days in hopes of ridding yourself of water.  Your mouth, dry of thirst, begs you to revitalize the desert of calcified cactus.  Your mind races as you fear you will soon be forced to hydrate by intravenous means.  A water bottle, barely opened, sits on your desk.  Reluctantly opening it, you chug the liquid hoping it will taste like nothing; it does not taste like nothing.  You notice later that your stomach feels bloated and your problems have not mysteriously vanished.  "Water was supposed to help," you cry.  Water was, in fact, supposed to help.  Water is not the reason you do not feel helped.

When you were younger, your mom used to water down the juice you'd drink in your sippy cup.  She tricked you into loving water while you guzzled "White Grape Peach" and sat in your underwear watching Boomerang and Nickelodeon.  You were given water through umbilical cord for the first eight to nine months of your conception and growth, and it's not like you could have possibly understood that.  You learned water was a necessity for life in your fourth grade science class, around the time you learned the word ecosystem and habitat and you watched as the "religion is my personality" kids' parents barged into the class demanding that the teacher not talk about evolution.  Food, water, shelter, and space.  That's right.  Well, perhaps that too can be disputed some day.  After all, people deny the necessity of the Oxford comma--which kind of rocked your world, considering they'd never ask you that on standardized testing--so perhaps one day this provincial society will finally find out a way to exist without water. 

What is the use of water if people can drown in it?  Hath God not giveth us gills, we shalt not properly enjoyeth swimming.  How can something be so necessary, yet so overconsumed?  Are people going to consistently indulge in that which makes them unhappy?  Well, that's actually... unrelated.  Will this water be the undoing of our ecosystem?

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.