CW: blood, heights, falling
I am in the house of my friend’s boyfriend’s great aunt, lying in a guest room bed with feathery soft sheets and plush down pillows. My body is sore, exhausted, but lighter than ever. The open window brings in a gentle breeze, and the scent of jasmine and honeysuckle wafts in from the backyard garden. The sound of ocean waves drifts me in and out of sleep, in and out of consciousness.
Whhhooooossshhhhhh...whhhhhoooossshhh...whhhoooosshhhh...
I can’t tell if I am awake or sleeping, if it is a dream or reality, but it doesn’t matter. As the waves crash in the San Francisco Bay outside, the room around me sways and begins to dissolve, flowing over my body and creating ripples as it hits my skin. The world around me turns to liquid and suddenly I, too, am no longer solid. The boundaries of my body, the line between my skin and the air disappears as I am carried along with wave after wave after wave. I am in the wave, I am the wave, I am everything and nothing else matters. Since then, nothing has felt still.
Two days earlier, I sit by a waterfall running from the melted snow of a mountain peak in the Sierra Nevadas. The water is ice cold, but that morning Sam showed me how to control my breath and stabilize the temperature of my body, to stop shivering and bring out the warmth from my core. Inhale, exhale...inhale, exhale...inhale...exhale....The water no longer feels like icy daggers, but like cool aloe over a soft burn. But now I am crying, weeping deeply and uncontrollably, and my tears carry the weight of months and months of bottled emotions. I weep for all of the sadness, the hurt, for the storm brewing within me, that I never allow myself to feel for fear of its depths.
Moments earlier, I’m hoisting myself up the side of a 50-foot rock face along a small crack, shoving my feet into the granite and twisting until it feels like my ankle will sprain. I jam my cupped hands inside of the crack, and I climb up and up and up, forgetting that there were directions other than up.
My foot slips out of the crack, and my hands grasp the bare rock desperately, but there is nothing to hold on to. I plunge.
I am falling through the air, with nothing to meet me but the crumpling of my body and my own last breath ringing through the trees. This is it, I think, I am dying. This is the end.
The rope catches me sharply and my body collides with this unforgiving rock face, bashing against my knees, hands, elbows, which all start to ooze bright crimson blood. My mind is completely empty and snaps back into reality. I open my eyes, and the world re-materializes around me, my body comes into existence again. Voices shout from below. I come to my senses and continue descending the rock, speechless and barely breathing, remove the harness and walk over to a waterfall. I sit and cry.
That night, we soak in a hot spring. The sulfur turns our skin to baby-like softness and relaxes our sore muscles from a day of clambering up and down mountains. The sky is clear and filled with stars, and we watch the moon rise from the horizon and illuminate the darkness. Our conversation flows from astrology to GMO corn to microdosing shrooms to the origins of life. One theory says that life first emerged from a hot sulfur spring like this one, where organisms grew in complexity and developed into animals that could eventually walk onto land. I imagine for a moment that this hot spring is that origin point of life, that we had lived our whole lives in this hot water, growing from single-celled bacteria into these strange and fragile human bodies. When we emerge from the water we would be the first beings to ever walk on land. All of life may have emerged from a single pool of water, and one day it might end there as well. I think about the power of nature and its ability to have survived several mass extinctions. Perhaps another is coming. How silly it is that humans think they have the power to destroy nature. I laugh.
I stay up to watch the sun rise and stain the sky in rich reds, pinks, purples, and blues. I walk along a dirt path, collecting pieces of black obsidian along the way. I find five beautiful pieces of the ancient lava, and polish them with my spit and the edge of my shirt until they shine a deep and soulless black. I look up and realize I am lost, that I had never stopped to figure out where I was going and how I might be able to make my way back. So typical of someone who constantly pushes forward and up, yet never plans ahead.
I daydream about being a vagabond, about filling a backpack with all my belongings and making my way across the country, or the world perhaps, with no particular destination in mind. Maybe this idea originated from my young love of Pokemon and the idyllic story that one could leave home and embark on a great adventure at the age of 10. But even as I contemplate this, reality brings me back and I come up with a thousand reasons why it would never work. I would run out of money, I wouldn’t have places to stay, I would get lonely, I could get kidnapped or worse. I pocket the idea in an “alternate lifetime” folder somewhere in my mind.
All my life I have felt like I was waiting for something, that I was preparing myself for some big happening. Some grand event would play out, and it would be a final test of sorts, challenging all of the mental and physical skills I had built up in my life so far. This was all training, of course, for the real deal. I have waited and waited and waited, every now and then getting false hope that this event had finally come. I imagined that one day an enormously powerful wave would swoop me up, engulf me, and take me along an adventure of a lifetime.
As I lay in this stranger’s bed, in a beautiful house at the tip top of Sausalito, I listen to the waves crash against the shore outside, feeling those same waves travelling through my body. I have realized that this great wave in my dreams does not exist outside of me. It will not come randomly one day to take me away. This wave, with an energy and strength more powerful than anything I could imagine, exists within me and all around me. The answer is so simple to me now: water is but a medium for the waves, a liquid material that makes their form visible, tangible, powerful. When those same waves travel from water to air to the skin, blood, and bones of our bodies, they do not disappear but only change form. If we focus our attention we can still feel those waves, even hear them. One day I will summon the wave’s full power, when I am ready to take it on. For now, I am content knowing it is there, that it is growing within and around me and I am feeding it every day. Nothing is still, everything is movement, and we are surrounded by waves. All we can do is let it carry us.
Whhhooooossshhhhhh...whhhhhoooossshhh...whhhoooosshhhh...
By Neena Wang
Images by Neena Wang
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