I cry a lot.
My tears operate independently: reclusive, streaming down my face without regard for happiness or sadness. Simply salty, stemming from the small glands above my eyes and funneling profusely through frequently used tear ducts.
The wetness smears and smudges my makeup and stains my clothes; even after dried, there is nothing to erase the imprint of a memory.
I also love the beach.
I enjoy Grand Haven summers, laying out on the rocky shores of Key West, breathing through the tube of a snorkel mask in the radiant waters of St. Croix—it’s rejuvenating, being under the sun with nothing protecting my skin from the blast of rays or bite of salt water.
I spend ten hours during a normal week training on the track, sprinting relentlessly in an oval in hopes of shaving my time down by mere milliseconds. On chilled days, sleety rain explodes from the rubber surface as I sprint by, causing splotches of mud and grime to cling to my joggers.
On warm days, however, beads of sweat pool on my forehead and slide down my back. I gulp ice water in between sets, hoping some sort of revitalization follows me back to the start line.
Rain pounds my windshield on otherwise silent drives. Water laced with chlorine fills my nostrils and throat whenever I dive into the pool in my backyard. Ice blisters on my skin when I submerge myself into a numbing ice bath after a long track practice or meet. I splash my face with cold water from the faucet every morning, an act so repetitive and mundane that it has nearly lost its meaning.
I have seen pretty water, decorated with a thousand electric crystals of teal and aquamarine. With this, adventures typically involve swimming with sea turtles or grasping the handles of a tube as my dad whips me around behind a pontoon on a lake somewhere far in northern Michigan. Sometimes the water is ugly, dousing my clothes in a splatter of polluted, brown drops when I kayak on the river.
Water is memories. It holds memories and recycles them, taking one person’s recollections and gifting them to another deserving individual.
Water follows me through my inside jokes: drinking “baby water” in some forgotten alley in the Galápagos Islands, skittering across dark-hued horizons on a packed boat in the Pacific—the boat that only the real ones are still on today.
It follows a narrative, endless ebb and flow, transferring one memory to the next in an array of colors and stages of matter. Never forgotten, regardless of the evaporated trail that lies in the wake.
