Mizu

Water has cut through, pushed up against my whole life - rivers first, then a canal and now one of the Great Lakes. City life, recreation or summer holidays - all permeated by the sound of water. I have spent summers swimming in small creeks, manmade and natural lakes in provincial parks, winters skating over the frozen rivers. It flows up, filling the cracks of every day life, a constant presence. I hear the waves of the lake as I cycle to work, rhythmic, keeping time with my pedals. I feel the lake move, rising up into the hot air to settle over the city as an invisible mass, stifling but a staple of Toronto summers. Predictably, luckily, it also flows through my house, over my body, into my mouth, sating thirst and cleansing the marks life leaves.

I stare at the ceiling in the low lit room. The reflections of the water intensify and recede as swimmers in other lanes dive below, sit on the edge, quietly chat. My shoulder pulses slightly, rotator cuff irritated by the laps I lost count of and I float, limbs limp. The sounds are muffled but my thoughts loud. I glance at the clock and see the remaining seconds of my time in the lane ticking down and take a deep breath, making my way back to the end of the pool. I rest and yet my heart is still pounding. Standing on the quiet pool deck, I drink deeply - cool water running down my throat, the feeling spreading through my chest. I make my way to the sauna, a soothing, nondescript instrumental song plays quietly. I lay back among the others, trying to find some kind of calm, my deep breaths and racing heart at odds with one another.

In the wake of a nuclear blast, you cannot drink water. A first consideration may have you think this is due to the ambient radiation left in the bomb's wake, but it is actually due to the extreme dehydration those caught in the fallout instantly suffer. The soothing balm from which all life rises becomes a violent affront to the system that cries out for it. Paul Ham describes the phenomenon in Hiroshima Nagasaki:

"[...]extreme thirst overrode the pain of their wounds: 'Mizu! Mizu! [Water! Water!]' they cried. The very source of life seemed to have become a form of poison. 'You'll die if you drink the water,' someone warned the crowd at Hijiyama Bridge. They drank; they died. But water was not the cause, it was simply inadequate. The victims needed a comprehensive rehydration that would replace the electrolytes and proteins lost. None was available and the people thought water was killing them. A girl screamed 'The faster I die the better,' and jumped into the river. The rivers, the ponds, the tanks seemed deadly oases...They slaked their thirst at the rock pools of Asano Park and died amid the gardens, bamboo groves and maple trees." p.315, 2014

I never actually finished this book. I could not bring myself to finish chapters 17 and 19, covering the fallout in Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively. I made it to page 508 yet those 30 or so pages have, to this day, gone unread, unable as I was to control my heaving sobs, pages blurred by tears that would not stop. The devastation felt incalculable and the cries for water, for life, for a relief of an affliction as common as thirst have been ringing in my head ever since. What cruelty, what utter evil to build a world in which this indignity and loss is little more than a calculation in the meetings of violent people.

I am sweating in a lovely sauna and I can't stop thinking about Madeline fucking Albright.

“I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”

A couple weeks back, I had realised I was a whole 3 seasons behind on the podcast Blowback. While I could have started where I left off, it had been almost 6 years since I listened to season 1 and chose to restart. Day by day, episode by revisited episode, I felt like I was being punished for being too young in 2001; the same occupation, violence and idiocy playing out. I am sitting in a lovely sauna and all my brain can conjure is the clip of Madeline Albright.

“We have heard that half a million [Iraqi] children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima,” asked Stahl, “And, you know, is the price worth it?”
“I think that is a very hard choice,” Albright answered, “but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”

Not said behind closed doors, but on television, for all to see. Murdered children are a price worth paying. The calculations of cruel, crass women and men. As I am sitting in the sauna, the number of dead schoolgirls in Iran is being reported in the mid 80s - by the time of writing it is well over one hundred and the school, the fucking school, was double tapped. Two strikes, 40 minutes apart to murder schoolgirls and the ones who wanted to save them, to find them, to give them dignity in the eternal rest that came far too soon. Desalination plants have been targeted, Lebanon invaded and toxic air choking out whole cities. Infrastructure is devastated, civilians murdered for billions of dollars a day. A price, they think, a price that is worth it.

My soapy hands are curled around the edge of the sink, it's late and it is all too much. I turn off the tap and water continues to drip into the sink as I cry. Vicious, deluded freaks march our world to the very brink and I need to show up to work and act like it's any normal day, like my heart isn't perpetually breaking and broken, because I need to be able to pay my rent. I cry for children whose names I'll never know, who are already being forgotten by a weak and incredulous media system, I cry for a planet so beautiful and so brutalized, I cry for my future and for yours, I cry because I love it all so goddamn much.

Thank you, friends, for your patience with me. As I am sure the topic conveys, this piece took over my brain for the past couple weeks and I really struggled to get it out, both in that it was painful and that nothing felt like an important contribution. I have also been writing a homebrew DND campaign and boy, oh boy do I feel like I have no words left a lot of days. I keep finding myself starting drafts that feel too hard to trek through the thoughts of and just adding to the pile of unfinished work. As much as I read the news too much, I am going to try to step back from focusing only on such intense things. I think it's important to remember why we fight for a better world, to find joy and defend it and I want to work towards having at least some of my writing be a reflection of that. I am also pleased to announce I am finally not sick after over 2 weeks and I feel like I have energy again. Some days it feels good to write and other days it feels insane and useless but we can't let the bad days win. Thank you again, any support, shares and subscriptions means a lot, particularly when I find it hard to write regularly. You'll hear from me again soon, I promise.

Also, listen to Blowback.