The Water Remembers
Got a writing prompt from my friend to pick a random item in my kitchen and make something up about it.
(We should totally make a writing prompt tag list where you see this, pick a random object in your kitchen, take a picture of it, and make up either a character about it or a short story and then post it and tag people you want to do the same. This is an open tag if anyone sees this and wants to do it.)
Here's the results of what I did (I did both a short story and character creation. Character Creation is below the cut):
*~*~*
The view of a sunrise from the top of the clouds where you can just begin to see the curve of the earth is something that most would call breathtaking.
The movement of energy coursing through a body that pushed itself to accomplish a goal until finally, finally it succeeded and the relief and joy and triumph that pulsed through it all at once is something that is both exhilarating and overwhelming at the same time.
There’s a small quiet shared over a cup of tea, between an older woman whose hands are aged and wrinkled with the memories of a life long and well lived, and a child that is grown and experiencing a first heartbreak as their hands hold the cup filled with warmth and comforting love.
The stories shared side by side between two friends as they sit together on a small porch at night, watching the fading stars overhead is soft and settling like a place they called home.
There is anger, hot and fierce as boiling water that fills the world with sound and shakes the walls and lashes out and grows and swells and threatens to choke until the heat is snuffed and a hollow ache remains.
There’s the beat of a bird’s wings as it lands in the early morning dew of the grass as the sky grows dark overhead, promising a storm as the smell of ozone and lightning grows denser the closer the wind beckons it.
The constant low grade hum of a bee hive that has quieted for the night as the rain lashes against the shelter they call home, the warmth of the others making them feel safe.
Every memory that swirls inside of me is not my own. But the emotions, and lives, and views, and pieces of their souls coat the walls of my shape and tell me of adventures the world outside have every single day and have had for so, so long. Longer than I can fully understand. Animals are connected to nature and nature is connected to humans and humans are connected to each other and hold so many hopes and dreams and fears and contradictions.
I savor them. I let them marinate inside me and, for a time, I live their lives, I see the way they move through the world. I experience their emotions. All of it unfolds like a story, like I’ve lived all of them simultaneously before the heat blooms beneath me, and I cry out, singing a piece of their song, their story, their lives into the world.
Most of them are gone by the time they reach me. Most of the lives I experience again and again, never the same one twice it seems, but all of them familiar in their own way. But I remember them. I hold them inside me like a vault. And though they pass through quickly, the images fleeting, the lives extinguished, the memories desperately clinging to something, anything to be remembered so they never truly die.
Because the water remembers. And I hold the water. And every life that has ever lived, the water has moved through them, touched them, remained with them even when they thought they were alone. But they never were, not really. They are surrounded by lives that have experienced things that made them joyful, made them grieve, made them angry, helped them understand and grow and believe and learn and triumph.
I hold the water, and the water holds on to memory. And the memory comes from a world that is connected and cherished and alive. And when the heat makes me sing, and the time for the water to move again has come, I don’t feel sad that the memories I briefly got to glimpse are leaving again so soon. Because I know they are going to join the others. Maybe not the same ones. Maybe new ones that will continue to move through other memories as time continues. Maybe they’ll find old ones or parts of themselves to reconnect for the first time again in ages and for a time be complete.
Either way, the memory never dies, not truly. It changes and grows and becomes bigger and smaller and different, and breaks apart and spreads an entire world’s length away, but never loses itself completely.
You pour the water into a cup, you let the tea steep within, and the water remembers the plants that made the tea and greet them like an old friend. And the comfort that settles into me knowing I helped move the memories onto their next adventure is a different warmth than the heat that warmed the water.
