droplets

Photo by Nagy Arnold on Unsplash

It is necessary to walk slowly, and with some grace, while balancing a water drop on my fingertip. A fine mist is like a cloud come to earth, like the air has reached max humidity and sprung a billion minuscule leaks. I watch my wobbly drop grow with each added pinhead of water, watch for the moment it outgrows my finger and surrenders to gravity. Water drops, like autumn leaves, are such precarious entities. One drip or gust away from falling out of their fragile individuality and back into the collective, becoming a no thing, a part of the hungry void. I feel a tug of fear, small as the drop itself but still enough to register on a fear-o-meter as well attuned as mine, each time my collected droplets roll away from my temporary shelter. Were I to hold on long enough, though, the drop would absorb into my skin and join the flow of my blood, or evaporate into the air where I might breathe it in. Can a water drop be happy, suspended on the precipice as it always is, slave to the singular demand of gravity? Can a leaf delight in it’s newfound vibrancy while staring down at the dirt that is it’s fate?

Another few steps, another drop collected from the tip of a burning bush branch. This one too big and it slides off immediately, disappeared into the uniform wetness coating the ground and dead grass. It is coating me as well. My jacket is wet through across the shoulders and back, nearly as damp in front. The wisps of hair poking out of my hood have collected clear pearls of almost-rain, my glasses are accumulating too many additional, concave lenses to see through effectively. It is not particularly cold out (if it was I wouldn’t be out walking) but each droplet strikes my face with a pinprick of iciness, the water warming instantly as it beads up on my skin. Water pooling in the grass squishes and splashes, displaced by each step and falling back into place behind me. I seem to leave no mark as I pass through this earth-cloud. Water beneath me, water all around me, water inside me rushing to keep my extremities warm and hydrated. One of so many seeming contradictions of nature: stewing in water dries you out. I touch my tongue to my lips, tasting the water that has gathered there. Like a plant I drink this day.

After so many rounds of the yard I am fully inhabiting my body, aware of the prickle along my thighs as the cold water numbs my nerves there, aware of each part of my exposed skin as it is struck by the icy pinpricks, aware of the heat I am generating with the repetitive movement, aware of the not altogether unpleasant ache in my lower back as the too-tight muscles stretch back into their normal shapes. It is sometimes a shock for me to remember that I have a body, that this mind that is me is contained inside a head attached to a lot of other bones and covered with skin and muscles that keep the squishy bits inside and define the parameters of me.