Sunday Bookmarks #.10
Happy Sunday friends, I am tired but my cup is full, I will never take for granted what joy spending time with others can bring, it almost makes the post-exertion malaise worth it. This week has been full of extremes, days where showering felt like a task too big, and others where my to-do list was ticked off by 10. I am cautiously optimistic after discussing the next stage of my treatment plan with my doctor, it feels like a privilege to finish medical appointments crying tears of joy and relief when I have only known anger and frustration before.
READING //
A joyous experience with Nina Mingya Powles’s upcoming essay collection, Small bodies of water. Nina writes with a familiarity that feels genuine, she talks earnestly of her grandparents and her favourite meals on anxiety and homesickness and the place you consider home when everyone keeps shifting. Do we think of home as the geographical location or wherever the people we hold dear, choose to transplant their roots? She lists places she loves to swim and places she feels like reality doesn’t exist. I am with her on those ones, she says time stops on empty train stations late at night, and although I cannot tell you the last time I waited for a train in the dark, I can feel the breeze of waterloo station at half-past eleven on a Tuesday night, like it was last week.
She talks of water, of the feeling of weightlessness you experience when you float, how a body can be relinquished when we give in to gravity and just swim. Weaved throughout are histories and folklores, the swimmers of eras gone by, Hanyo’s in South Korea, which I was blessed enough to see on my own trip there two summers ago. It made me itch for travel, for sun, and for foreign bodies of water I have yet to swim in. it had me reflecting on my body, my old one, the one that used to work. How I wish for another trip, a chance to explore a place far away, but what does that look like now I am disabled? I was sick when I last traveled, I slept many afternoons in our hotel in Seoul, but I wasn’t sick like this.
I was living partially in denial, I was knowing things could go wrong and doing them anyway. I had so much fun but was also so cruel to myself. Upset when my body refused to abide by the arbitrary rules I had set up for it. You are on holiday so why do you still feel rotten? You are somewhere far away, so why do your legs still not work? You have spent all this money and taken all this time, so why aren’t you good enough, dear body of mine.
Then she speaks of places closer to my home, native trees of hers growing on London side streets, meals in central’s china town. Again, she touches on the lockdown, it must be around now we will start to see the year that was so awful, named in books, both stories, and lives. It is overwhelming, given that so much is happening, even now. However here Nina talks of the minuscule, the day to day life when her plans had to change, Her trips to Hampstead ladies pond may even inspire me to visit, after being warded off that the London swimmers had made it a cult-like club, and I don’t deal well with following unwritten rules, so maybe I will dip my toe in the pond club after all.
*Small Bodies of water was kindly sent to me for review, from Canongate. it is out on 5th August, and you can pre-order it now.
THINKING ABOUT // All the places I swim
One of Nina’s essays is a set of locations, the places she has swum, and the memories they held. It took me straight back to places I have attached swimming to, and there are as follows
(1) my glorious Brighton beach, 8 am on a Saturday morning in hazy September.
Approximate air temperature :12 degrees.
Approx sea temperature :14 degrees.
Attire: black swimsuit, my boyfriend’s old wetsuit boots, a very warm towel.
Overall feeling: relief from days of depression, joyful solidarity at the few other women who’ve chosen to dip today, and buoyed by the cheers from dog walkers and passers-by.
Post swim snack: a squashed avocado bagel that fits so satisfyingly in my circular glass Ikea Tupperware I could cry every time I use it .
(2) An indoor waterpark, glass dome, complete with numerous palm trees and humidity to match.
Approx air temp: 17 degrees.
Approx water temp: close to bathtub feeling.
Attire: my favorite tammy girl black and neon yellow two-piece bikini, severely lacking in any sort of chest to fill the top half, wearing bikinis when you are five is a weird cultural norm that I don’t think I will have my future kids participate in.
Overall feeling: gleeful at riding the big slide without an adult, I wish I could go back and bottle that energy I had back then, enough to power an entire workforce I reckon.
Post swim snack: portion of chips in a styrofoam tray, absolutely no condiments, if ketchup even came near my side of the tray there would be a tantrum.
Other notes: my aunt is wearing marks and spencers green plaid swimsuit I wish was still in my possession now, my grandad has taken up residence at a table at the bottom of the slide, underneath a plastic feathered umbrella, who are they kidding trying to make us feel like we are on holiday and not on the outskirts of west London.
(3) Australia. No swimming in the sea here, the shark warnings are up and you wouldn’t dare attempt a dip anywhere on the coast this time of year, I had heard too many fabricated hostel stories, of missing legs and bitten surfboards, to risk it. Instead, a lagoon, a fancy way of saying, an outdoor swimming pool built by the beach but not on the beach, to protect us, pesky backpackers, from aforementioned shark risks, and drunken drownings.
Approx air temp: Sweaty
Approx water temp: too warm, doing nothing to help the hangover.
Overall feeling: blissful ignorance that life in this liminal pre-adult phase, unaware that it won’t last forever, plotting who to kiss at tonight’s hostel bar crawl.
Post dip snack: 2 smuggled bottles of cider, quickly confiscated by the jobsworth lifeguard, reminding us this is a family place. Instead, we drink lukewarm three-dollar wine from our water bottles.
Catch you all on another part of the internet,
Hannah