A Large Body of Water Could Symbolize Deep Emotions
One morning she woke floating. That is, her room was filled with water as if it had been sealed — caulked, a shower, but a room, and the room as bathtub, and the shower head switched on, and the room filled while she slept, carrying her above the bed. Each book had risen from the shelves, the stuffed penguin, the towel slung over the closet door. The dresser, not caulked, rose, too, and each dress and scarf slunk its way out in seaweed’s shapes. It took a moment for her wide eyes to understand they were wide and fine. No irritation, fleeing contacts, involuntarily closure. Also, she wasn’t breathing. When she gasped it was as if all the doors had opened, the air conditioner fallen out of the window, an exhalation of water from the room. She landed with a thump, and everything was dry. To look at it now, as if the wind blew through the room like a child, turning over the rocking chair, knocking askew the dresser and tumbling its clothes, catching the little trash in the small wastebasket in an updraft and leaving it carelessly across the bed. She waited for some intuition to come to her, some dream or power, but none did — no sense became a feeling became a thought. She looked at the window, at the air conditioner straining but still stuck in its bottom third. She looked lazily at the other window, at the door, as if the water had left some trace, a dampness. Nothing was wet, except the air. She heard her grandmother, quietly, predicting the muggy weather each of summer. She went to open the door, holding one last belief that the water had simply been hoarded on its other side. From the empty hallway she turned back. She went to the window, the other one, without an air conditioner, that was usually covered by a long blue curtain, and she opened it and looked out at the rain that was coming and wondered if it would flood.
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Intimacy Of
The intimacy of two people approaching an intersection, when they know neither will turn (although this can be confirmed only after the fact) and through subtle glances learn each other’s approximate velocities (corrected during transcription, I originally wrote “philosophies”) such that each adjusts those velocities to avoid running into the other, inevitably resulting in a near-miss because neither wants to cross the invisible threshold meaning one has definitively sped up or slowed down to accommodate the other person, because such a crossing would betray that each individual in fact did apprehend the other, did because of that apprehension, change course.