Watery Bodies

“I was worried slightly that anyone who saw me wading into the Scottish sea that misty morning might think I was killing myself when in fact it was the opposite; I was aliving myself.” 

– Amy Liptrot 

There are three reasons I am scared of dying.  

1. When investigating the circumstances of my tragic and early demise, I do not want police to discover the teddy I still sleep with or that my last Google searches were “Anthony Armstrong-Jones” and “how to write about depression.” 
2. All attempts at poetry written between 2001 and 2019 must never be found. 
3. I love my family, and I could not bear to hurt them. Ghostly imaginings of their grief are enough to anchor me to earth. Even in death, I know that I could not help but feed on my family’s sadness. 

We forget, don’t we, that when we die, we are dead. The pulse fades, our muscles relax, and the mind drifts into undisturbed rest. In life, we haunt ourselves. We’ve all done it. In bed at night, imagining life after our deaths. Images you didn’t know you had committed to memory. The sound of your parents crying in the wee hours when they thought you were sleeping. The white-eyed look of fear and rage when you are hurting and your parents know you cannot be fixed. The terror of knowing your parents will fall apart. Those people who, as you grew up, turned from superhero, to human, to superhuman. A blueprint of what form grief will take when we are gone. Nightmares of our own making. 

This is what I thought of when a therapist asked me if I had considered ending my life. I told her “no.” I thought about walking into oncoming traffic, but I didn’t tell her that. 

I had been working in a pharmacy. Under sterile white lights, I sold makeup, incontinence pads, and nipple guards and waited for the hiss of the automatic doors. Each time they swished open, I heard the cars, the lorries, the trains on the track. Swish of doors. Hush of traffic. Swish of doors. Din of shop. Over and over and over. I waited for customers to enter and customers to leave. I listened to the traffic. Stood at the front of the shop, behind the tills. If it gets too much, the road is just there. You can go. Do it. 

I listened to the traffic. I thought about my parents. Somewhere, in the hospital on the other side of town, Mum was feeding tubes and wires into tiny bodies. On another floor, Dad was lying on a table as radiation was beamed into his body. I thought of them twenty-two years ago, in the hospital waiting to meet me after months of IVF. I listened to the traffic. 

The previous winter, I worried my parents by not going to university after all. Six months later, I had a job that I hated, and Dad’s cancer treatment was making him ill. Shame welled up from my core. As Mum helped Dad navigate a world of radiotherapy and hormone injections, my mind grew foggier. Someone was dimming the lights. On top of her high-stress job, she now had a sick husband and a depressed daughter. There is only so much we can ask our mothers to do, so I took myself away to get help. Antidepressants and beta blockers. One in the evening, one before breakfast.  

Depression settles in your bones like damp. What at first you thought was fixable seeps into cracks you didn’t know existed. Layers peel away from the core of you and tarnish what was there before. Rotting from the inside out—images of yourself before the sadness is lost. Soon, you feel it best to tear down the life you’d made and start again. I don’t know about you, but I don’t believe we start again.  

~

My parents had an old Jack Russell. He liked toast and long grass, and he hated fireworks. After years of watching him fret over the autumnal artillery, they bought tablets that promised to keep him calm. No longer would we need the television to be ear-bleedingly high, nor cover his ears with cotton towels. Tablets administered in a block of cheddar; he settled slowly into a stupor. When the fireworks began, there were no signs of his usual anxiety. The barking and whining had gone. I watched as his head lolled to one side, and his legs quivered uncontrollably against his pink belly. His eyebrows rose at every bang, and still, his brown eyes widened in terror. Guilt bloomed in all of us. Far from easing our little dog’s fear, the tablets had simply stopped his ability to respond to it. 

~ 

I listened to the traffic. After months of circulating through my body, the tablets stopped the swelling sadness. They stopped me from feeling anything at all. Rising to work, listening to the traffic, coming home to sleep. Never moving forward, I froze like a clock hand repeating the same second. I listened to the traffic. I thought of my parents’ wide eyes and of myself rising from the ground to wipe away their tears. I didn’t want to die. Instead, I needed something to shock me into living. My boyfriend said I was a zombie. As I was on the verge of a breakdown, my doctor signed me off work.

My sadness breached its hideout on my best friend’s birthday. I drank enough Prosecco to fuel a hangover that lasted from Good Friday to Easter Monday. When a stranger in a bar called me “the epitome of depression,” I punched him. I came off the drugs and stopped the wild nights out. The next day, I quit my job at the pharmacy. It was time to get help. Sally, Rosie, Pauline, Jackson, Sarah. I began seeing a therapist and have done so, intermittently, ever since. 

~ 

In my undergraduate counsellor’s office, I sat watching men ascend the scaffolding beyond the window. University came calling in the end. 

“What do you do for fun?” she asked. 

“Wild swimming.” 

Growing up, swimming by default meant rivers and oceans. The notion of it being “wild” never occurred to us as children. We have added the word to distinguish chlorine from cold water. To me, wild swimming always seemed like something reserved for adrenaline junkies and triathletes. I am more of a wild bobber.  

Over the following weeks, the counsellor asked how my swimming was going. She spoke of documentaries watched, the benefits of cold water, and the wetsuited women she had seen at the beach. “Is that you?” she once asked. I told her that I only use a wetsuit in the winter but was trying to build up resistance.  

I can’t remember when I first began to crave the thrill of cold water. I hated swimming lessons and detested the galas that my school forced me to participate in. But cold water is innate to me and one that other people recognize. Years ago, I convinced a flatmate that my connection to water was down to Mum insisting I was born on the seashore. A barefaced lie. As a child on holiday in Majorca, I had stayed in the water so long I turned blue. The manic in me likes the thrill of the pain. 

I phoned Dad and asked him where my love for wild water came from.

“I think you started in rivers and streams in the New Forest,” he said. 

 A photograph of me and my best friend, around six or seven, swimming by a bridge in one of the forest rivers. Our bodies spectral under the orange water. Other children sit on the bank, watching. 

Mum disagrees with him. She claims it was open water pools in France that did it. Pools I stayed in all day until forcibly removed at bedtime. Talk to anyone claiming to be a “wild swimmer,” and you’ll get a myriad of reasons to do it. For one’s well-being, the challenge, the rush. When people stop me on the shoreline and ask why I do it, I find myself repeating the words of author Alexandra Heminsley: it is a “hangover in reverse.” 

I told my therapist this. She looked impressed. I felt depressed. I thought about walking into the sea.

In one of my final sessions, the hour ended with a waterfall of tears and words. I left the office to face my depression alone.

“You like the sea, so think of it like a wave.” She told me of her husband, who bought a boat though she detested sailing. On each voyage, she sat in the cabin, waiting to return to the marina.

“He taught me that I have to stand and face the waves. Watch each beast as it comes in. There is nothing that will stop it, but I know it is there and prepare myself for it.” 

These days, when I feel the damp creeping back into my bones, I think about walking into the sea.

~ 

I stood on the shoreline of my childhood beach. A skirr of air whipped at my ear. Looking up, I saw it was a gull, either black-headed or Mediterranean. For a while, it bobbed in the air, floating in one spot. It looked haughtily over its wing and, with no discernible effort, darted left to right in an imaginary slalom. Then it shat in the water before me. One of the lighter hazards of swimming in the sea, I suppose. 

~

I came back to my hometown after calling Mum from the darkness of my flat, in tears and homesick. Bundled into my parents’ Honda Civic, I was brought home to Dorset.  

The drive home from Devon had been a wet one, our car encased by the kind of mizzle that I’ve only known from living in the West Country. Dark leaves I couldn’t identify whizzed past the window, and my heart leapt when I saw the Welcome to Dorset sign. A weasel darted in front of the car, its russet coat fixed in the headlights. It bounded fluidly onto the verge, and in my mind, it looked like a child. A toddler chasing butterflies. Buzzards turned on the wind high above us, and at the center of a field overgrown with grass, I saw a lone doe, plain and unmoving.  

I usually start to settle by the hills around Bridport. I twisted my neck to look at the sea between the farmland as we drove east. My view of the grey water was obscured by trees. A rift of sea mist clung to the hills, and I watched the old manors that served as my landmarks slip in and out of view, straining my neck to see each of them. The familiarity was fading. Only glimpses remained. Inside Dorset’s borders, I thought I would be able to see my homeland clearly. Perhaps we only come to understand these places once we have left.  

“I expect you’ll want to go swimming while you’re back,” Mum had said from the passenger seat. 

~

Now it’s my final day in Dorset, and here I stand on the shoreline of my favourite place to swim, watching guano disappear beneath the sea’s surface like yogurt down a drain. Time to get in. 

People have different techniques for entering cold water. Some people edge in, waiting for each limb to acclimatize. Mum walks up to her waist and then dives into breaststroke, head held high above the surface. I creep in. Waves lick at my toes, so cold it burns. The bottom half is easy; feet and legs are forgotten as they go numb. I walk in steadily until the water line cuts my head from my shoulders. Easier said than done when the cold forces your shoulders up to your ears. Sometimes, as I walk in, I imagine Virginia and Ophelia at my side. Then I remember that they walked into lakes and leave these melancholy ruminations with my towel and knickers.

I crave cold water because it makes me feel. After the slow stagnation of monotonous everyday life, cold water injects vitality. It forces me into living. To feel the prickle of water on the skin is intensely physical, an act of simply stepping from our terrestrial world into one made of water.

Roger Deakin, a writer and environmentalist, called it “the frog’s eye view.” Perhaps for me, it is the gull’s eye view, sitting on top of the water, neither in nor out. For a while, we can be as they are. Slip on our swimming costumes and cut through the water as it loops and slides around us. Slipping into wild water, we see a world not quite ours. An in-between.

There is something about our two watery bodies, the sea and me, wrapped around each other. On the shore, Dad is looking through his binoculars at ships moored on the horizon. Mum is eating an orange. Now, when the damp creeps in, I’ll think of them and imagine walking into oncoming waves.