Becoming Liquid

A few weeks ago while binging Tiny House videos, I came across one with an interesting interview with architect Douglas Wan. He said something that hasn’t really left my head since, that people are “liquid,” and conform their bodies to the spaces they are in.

What a thought.

To be liquid, to be movable, versatile, forgiving.

We are in the rainy mess of summer here and I am surrounded by wet metaphors. And if you look at my past blogs, you’ll see that thread trawling like a fishing line in my thoughts. It was heavy in my decision to dye my hair grey, I wanted something versatile that changes in the light, like a traveling storm cloud. I feel surrounded by water, drowning in pools and rain. And I wonder if I can be as powerful as that water, as flexible, as liquid.

Bodily, I have never been such. Could never touch my toes. Physically and metaphysically I feel rigid. Restrained. And with that lack of elasticity I am frozen with a certain fragility.

I feel like glass, able to mimic the appearance of liquid, deeply in danger of shattering. Like Charles VI, I fee a deep desire to pad my existence. What made these lines and edges when we do not suffer the same disease?

I take longer showers now, perhaps to make myself more taught and liquid. I like to pretend that these surrounding tragedies aren’t affecting me, when I know they are. That the all-encompassing stress, the panic, the anger that borders in me on violence, has impeded my ability to create. Or even to want to create or to be around people. That it was create a sieve out of the reservoir I had for creative energy and drained it.

I used to think myself a bit of an agent of chaos. That I would have the resolve in moments of disarray and shore up enough energy to prosper. I never imagined something as this, as constant, nor that it and my health would sap myself of so much energy that any such strength I could gain to take care of myself and others would be absent. A dried up husk.

Rather than fight it, I m trying to become liquid. I am trying to fit the space I am in. Desperately trying to claw my way up the walls of this, to refill my reservoir despite the lingering specter of death that is ever-present.

At the moment I am still dried, rigid. But I am desperate to melt.

See you on the flip side amigxs.

-La Queta

Want more about people changing state? Check out my book.