Sometimes I think life can be lived underwater.

Or seemingly so.

Often I look back at a period of time and think to myself, Where did it go?  Was I really present for that event?  Am I floating?  Head and arms numbed by the sensation of fluidity, bobbing as the waves lull me along.

I notice this often when Christa asks me questions like, "Do you remember when Anna did this ("x") when she was a baby?" As a reply, I usually scratch my head and say, "No, not really," or "Kind of…I guess?" Like a sunken Atlantis I feel submerged at times in my own experience, my own struggles–even my own thoughts.

Maybe this is all just language learning overload, a side effect of cultural adaptation, or a result of feeling slightly unsettled for an extended period of time. Maybe it’s the early stages of Alzheimer’s. Maybe it’s thinly veiled narcissism.

Not sure what causes it. But since classes have let out for the semester I have found myself floating…down currents I know not where.

In two nights we fly back to Thailand.  Did the floodwaters carry us upstream and back again?

In two nights I will be 32 years old.  The water’s rising, Pa…get ready to tread.

And right now I’m just not sure how I feel about so much unfettered aquatic essence–these precocious streams and currents. They take you where they want to go, without apology or explanation. They leave you wondering where you’ve been.

On my way to Xiahe in the bus, for a moment, the riptide subsided:

I looked out the window from the calm surface of my seat. I saw two young Tibetan girls standing on a bridge. Their long black hair bobbed in pony tails against their colorful sweaters. They were fluid–in motion–like waves crashing against a sandy shore. With smiles on windblown cheeks they watched the rocks they had just hurled arc out from their hands to the deep abyss below. And suspended in time momentarily, the rocks hung there, and I wondered what the splash would be like?

Would it ripple? Would the rings reverberate through the pond, through the bus walls, through me, and out into the world beyond? Could I continue to float with the waters stirred up like this? Would my Tibetan companions be swept away in the tidal wave?

And then the rocks HIT

…the ice below, with an (imagined) crack and a skittering across the frozen water.

The girls (their joy, their joy) just shined. And I wanted to congratulate them; to jump off the bus and cheer. I wished I had a stone to throw as encore or that I could have been under the ice, floating there instead of here, watching from below. And I wondered what it must be like to be trapped under that ice and to suddenly have it crack and splinter above my head. To thrust through the frigid chunks, to gasp and shudder, to yell for help, to breathe deep and grasp extended arms, to learn to love two stones thrown–that freed me from my icy water.

And then as the bus was swept downstream away from these two heroines, I realized that I imagine things I already know. And I am floating. I am floating.