Release of water

It was summertime and we had been playing in a blue plastic kiddie pool when we decided to take off our suits and wash them.  We knelt naked outside the pool and pushed our suits into the water up and down.  After they had gone through a full cycle, we would stand up and ring out our suits.  The ringing of the wet suits was my favorite part of the game. There was something extraordinary about the release of water from the twisting of the cloth.

 

I have been filming the breaking of water balloons on the top of people’s heads.  I don’t know what it means. I just keep doing it.  I think about how we all start out in our mother’s water balloon.  Our release depending upon the rupture of the amniotic membrane. The breaking of the water marks our entry into life outside the womb.  

 

A yellow plastic cup always sat on the side of our tub.  My mom would kneel beside the tub and would use the yellow cup to pour water over my head to wash my hair.  It took six or seven pours to get the soap out.  I liked to stay in the tub until the water completely drained. I liked to feel the release of the water around my body.  The release of the day’s weight.   The release of stillness confronts your body as you lay in the tub and let the water drain.

 

When I started school I had a chronic anxiety of the loss of bladder control.  While riding the bus I did what I called “cupping.” Both hands would cup my crotch insuring there would be no water rupture.  When Kari Orchard sat next to me on the bus, she told me that it really didn’t look so proper for me to hold my privates.  It really didn’t mater to me what anyone thought.  I did it as more of a ritual or prayer really.  My cupping prayer gave me control over my bladder for a whole hour-long bus ride over curvy, pothole-filled dirt roads.  A bus ride that went through what was called “suicide rollercoaster hill”.  In the wintertime I had to cup extra hard because the roads were always icy.

 

My grandmother was wearing a dark gray dress with blue circles.  She stood in the frame of her cadmium light painted door waving goodbye to us. She had just swallowed two tablets of nitroglycerin when she fainted.  She slowly dropped to the ground as pee ran down her leg. Her bladder let go as her body went into fight or flight mode to regain control of her heart.  Her dress had been my fortress when I was small.  During my first thunderstorm I ran to my grandmother and hid under her dress. I was safe underneath her dress. That moment her dress sheltered a small puddle on the ground. I had never seen a grown up wet themselves.  An involuntary release of water.