TheBanyanTree: sinking

[Julie Anna Teague]

The water draining out of the tub.  That sinking feeling.  I suppose we've
all done it.  As a kid I was simply mesmerized by the feeling of sinking
without sinking, of becoming heavy, heavy, and then nothing.

These days--these days of being forty, forty-one, forty-two--sometimes,
still, I let the bath water drain around me.  No longer as mesmerized by
the sinking as I am with being completely unable, totally unable, to
move--the inability to make myself get out while the cool water sucks me
down, and the inability to explain why.  Tonight it was a short story I
read in the bath.  Something about it, I don't know.  I couldn't peel away
enough layers to completely understand it, and yet it struck me deeply and
stuck in my head.  Froze there.  Completely iced, from my brain, down my
arms, to my fingers, to my toes.  I could not move because I was part of
the story, or it was part of me, and even while the words ran out with the
water, I had not wrapped up it's meaning and put it away. 

Other times, it is sadness, worry, some difficult thing that paralyzes me
until the tub water goes cold.  "The water is cold," I think, and pull the
drain knob with my toe.  "I am sinking," I think, "I am heavy, heavy,
heavy.  I cannot move."  A single rational thought creeps in before the
water is completely gone: How will I explain this?  Lying here in the tub
with no water, shivering?  It won't make any sense at all to anyone else,
and barely makes sense to me.  I think about being a kid, when the simple
feeling of getting heavier and heavier was enough, when heavy wasn't
anything at all. I reach for an explanation, for some words, any words,
but the effort threatens to sink me. 


 
Julie
jateague at indiana.edu