and somehow it begins

At work the other day, it came to me that I have a super power. A guest at the hotel had come to ask for a new remote control for the television in his room. I turned my hearing-aid to the telecoil switch and aimed the remote at it (telecoils convert electricity to sound). When I pressed a button, it made its customary beedle beedle beedle sound, so I knew the battery was still good and that the problem was with the TV itself. My uncontested super power is that I can detect whether batteries are good in any remote. I’ve done this a lot in my life, ever since I discovered it.

That’s not a super-power, you say. That’s just a fancy tool, like the Batarang. True, true. But I do have another super-power I never talk about: I can walk on water.

No, it’s not a joke, like walking on a frozen lake, or crossing a dewy lawn on the way to the mailbox. I can do those things, too, of course. I don’t talk about walking on water much, because everyone discounts it. I mean, you are right now. I would.

When you think about walking on water, what are you thinking about? Yeah. Him. It’s His gig; that, and the water.into.wine thing. I’m not comparing myself to Him or claiming to be Him, I’m just telling you I can walk on water.

It’s not by choice, either. No matter where I walk, there’s always water underfoot. You know those comics depicting some grumpy person walking under a perpetual cloud that rains on them all the time? It’s kinda like that, only I’m not so much under the cloud as inside it.

Now, so far as super-powers go, walking on water sounds much better than it is, and in point of fact, it’s rarely of any use at all. It’s not like there are crimes taking place on water that only I can get to. I can’t save children in a burning orphanage unless it’s in the middle of a pond. This ain’t no easy path to riches & bitches, dollars & dames. Waterwalking Man would be a boring comic, because while walking on water isn’t always boring, usually it is.

When you picture Him walking on water, the water is glassy smooth, right? Imagining walking on water, we think of ponds and small lakes, not streams and rivers and oceans. Try walking on a creek sometime, and good luck choosing your landing spot on the other side. Sometimes you never know where you’re going to end up. It’s not as bad on lakes and ponds, of course, but the ocean’s a bitch, believe me. You’d think the salt content would help with floatation, but floatation is never the issue; maintaining my footing in the chops and swells of the living ocean is; keeping myself upright and my head above water is. And no matter where I go, there’s water underfoot, deeper at some times than others.

It gets wet, too; it’s water. I’m wet constantly, my feet are perpetually wrinkled, my socks and shoes disintegrate, my pants cling to my legs, it’s cold a lot, and clammy sometimes. It’s not like I always hover a millimeter above the surface. I can’t control my depth. But even when I’m treading on the very top of the water, footing is always an issue: I could fall in anytime, and I do, a lot.

Sometimes I’m in up to my knees, and I move slower. Or up to my waist, or my chest, or my neck, and then I’m just treading water, and the only thing I’m capable of doing is keeping my nose up and staying alive. Long stretches of time go by like that. It can be boring. It can be deadly boring. So dull and colourless and hopeless. The water splatting up against my face, making every breath a task to concentrate on, causing distorted echoes in my ears, getting up my nose and in my eyes. Sometimes it goes on so long, so dully repetitive and soul-crushingly grey, so relentlessly, demonically insistent, that the idea of Hell becomes attractive. At least fire is red and warm and dry, and it couldn’t be worse than here. When I get that deep, when breathing is all I have left in the world, no other conscious movement is possible (I can barely think under water, let alone write) and it’s like trying to swim through blackcurrant jelly. At that point all I can do is wait it out, and hope eventually I will rise back up and venture once again amongst the land-walkers, the Opies, the norms.

There are virtually no other people in this water with me, either. I’m alone out here, bobbing and waiting, hoping and despairing. Some of the people I knew before I landed in the water are nowhere to be found anymore. Some try to help and get frustrated that they cannot; some get scared away, frightened by the pain they see me in; others just don’t know where to find me, way out here, half-submerged. I tend to lose track of the people in my life, to lose friends. I never meet people here. I usually don’t want to, anyway; it’s too much bother and distracts from the effort of keeping my nose out of water. If I head toward them -if I consciously head toward

anything

- I get nowhere, and my goal seems to recede, fading from view, ever-elusive. It’s easy to give up and just concentrate on staying alive.

I long for land some days. You might think it would be all I could think about, tossed about in relentless wet, but sometimes hope and longing and desire are simply work with no reward, distracting me from my efforts to breathe, and even those, too, recede. I look at land, from here in the water, and try to remember what it’s like to be dry and warm and in control. To walk on an unyielding surface that doesn’t seek to subvert me. To not have to be so stubbornly conscious of each step, but walk with the easy confidence I see in the land-dwellers I envy so much. I imagine dancing, or running, and then I look down at my feet -if I can see them through the dank water- and it makes me want to cry. I do try to go ashore sometimes, to get out of the life-forsaken water, but it almost never works. It’s only when I stop striving for it that I find it coming closer to me. It comes to me as it wishes, on its own timetable, and with no regard for whether I’m ready.

Eventually I do manage to get ashore, of course, and I am surprised to find myself there. Amazingly, sometimes I can forget I was ever in the water. It’s like it never happened. My life can go on as normal, and things seem less hopeless and despairing but I never have any idea how long this will last. One might think I’d use this time on land purposefully, cherishing each non-water-logged moment as it comes. What happens instead, though, is that I forget all about the water and spend an enormous amount of time trying to rectify the consequences of abandoning my normal life for it. A picking up and drying out the soggy pieces, if you will.

When I’m in the water, lost to the world, it’s hard to keep a job, a home, a girl, sanity. I float away from them. Those things all have to be reacquired when I (if I) eventually leave the water. The longer I was away from this solidity, this land of dreams and realities, the more completely my life has disintegrated and the harder the reconstruction can be. Each time I must begin anew, always planting, never harvesting. Being dry means work: the constructive piecing together of my dreams, labouriously striving to build something to cling to the next time the water pulls me.

On land, the water calls to me constantly. Sometimes it’s nothing more than a murmur, the soothing lull of a slow-moving brook in a meadow, effortless to ignore, almost comforting in its reassuring permanence. When the water does call me back, it can happen insidiously, slowly, I become like a wick soaking up oil, until I find myself sinking, watching the land turn to quicksand and vanish altogether. If I have to go back to the water, this is the way I want to do so, this sliding into it, this stealthy submersion is the ‘preferred method’. The other way is much more painful.

The other way can start so beautifully.

Sometimes. Oh, sometimes, the most amazing thing happens. Sometimes the sun dazzles among the raindrops, lighting each individually, rendering all in slow motion, and I dance from one to another, from each to the next, vaulting higher and higher. I can walk on steam. Or fog. But the best, the best is when I can ride invisible currents of evaporated water ascending to become clouds. Wafting invincibly toward enlightenment. Have you ever sat on a cloud? I have. Only a few times, mind you, but I have. And I treasure those times. The view alone is magnificent.

And then to float in the cloud as I floated in the water. Only this time, the water isn’t holding me back, it’s keeping me up. Instead of struggling to breathe, life is suddenly easy beyond compare. I can see any part of the universe perfectly clearly by looking through the lens the water becomes. I can simply crash water molecules together and create vibrant images that flow from me like, well, like water. I can form great things out of no things. I feel in complete control. It’s a heady feeling.

When I’m up there, when I can control how I walk on the water, and where, I tend to meet people, and even befriend them. They think I’m wonderful; talented, charming, commanding of my world, confident and unafraid. And I am all those things, because I no longer even know what it means to be afraid at that point. I’ve transcended my dreams of the land, and forgotten the depths of the water entirely; I’m completely in thrall to my own possibilities. I’m high; I’m completely, wonderfully, energetically, deliriously, mag ni ficently high, and there is no down.

There is always down.

Down is always there, and I forget that at my own peril. I’ve never stayed up; I always come back down. It’s guaranteed. Sometimes I am aware that I will return, and can strive to find the ground before I fall to it. Actually, this has only happened once, I think. It’s not easy; there’s very little to control. I’ll be sitting on my cloud, carving grand monuments out of cloud-stuff, all proud and satisfied with my work, when suddenly the cloud disappears from under me and I fall.

Falling hurts. It’s not just the splat at the bottom. It’s the loss. The aching mourning for something better that’s just not there anymore, that I don’t know if I’ll ever get back. Sometimes I land on land, and can go back to the task of rebuilding, but usually I plummet straight into the ocean. Sometimes I’ve gone so far down I feel certain I will drown, or that I will die unknown, floating among the detritus of my life-shards.

Life is a constant cycle of hydrological nightmares, terrestrial intentions, and celestial soarings, and It Shall Always Be Thus.