Liquidity

By Nicole Chen for Liquidity FW21

Yesterday, I took the bus by myself to see the water. The closest body was a small bay wrapped in a skinny beach. It took half an hour to get there, but by the time I did, I’d already forgotten the way there. I paced around the bus stop for a while, unsure of how to approach the shore. The possibilities stretched out in front of me, and they made my chest ache and pound. When I finally gathered enough of myself, I walked across pebbles and grains, tan and grey, slippery and coarse. The water wriggled up to greet me. We stood like that for a while, just together.  

Today, I asked the sea if it wanted to switch bodies with me. “Just for a bit,” I promised. It was late afternoon by then, and the birds had already flown home, so we switched, just to see what it was like. 

My face felt tight in this body, as if it were being stretched for miles, and my limbs hung heavy with a pressure I couldn’t shake. I pulled at my head for hair I didn’t have and grasped at my hands. They slipped away from each other as quickly as they came together. 

I slinked to the shore and stared up at my body. It looked so tiny all of the sudden, so cramped. “How do you feel?” I asked, but my body didn’t respond. Or maybe I just couldn’t hear over the sound of my own roars. So I gave up on asking and focused instead on the other things I could see. There was a very large fish swimming inside of me, so large that for a moment I became afraid, before I remembered that in that moment, I was invincible. I saw pink glossy rocks at my feet, the cap of a plastic water bottle, and a crab trying to crawl back home to its shell. 

After a few hours I began to feel cold. The sun was setting, and it was December, and there was no coat I could wear. I crept up the beach until I could see my body in my reflection. “Ready to switch back now?” I said. We stared at each other and ourselves, both so free and so trapped. I wrapped myself around my body, and whispered, “It will all go back to the way things were.” We switched back. And I was right.