ArcaMax

I stood inside 7-Eleven on my way to the office, staring dead-eyed at the drink case and reaching for yet another Celsius to patch in the cracks of exhaustion. A disembodied voice emerged from my left temporal lobe, whispering:

Water.

I bought the dumbest bottle of water. It was Icelandic, or Norwegian, or from some other place abroad that called to mind clear streams. It bragged about alkaline or electrolytes or, I don't know, magnesium? Who cares? The more specious health claims the better, as I was not fact-checking a thing. I guzzled from the juicy, overpriced plastic chalice, my friend.

Water.

I've been thinking about water, my relationship to drinking it and being inside it. It's possible I've read one too many novels in which frustrated adults transform into animals before their confused family's eyes, but hear me out: What if my essence is really, like, a California fur seal? Something floppy that mostly prefers to be unbothered but also enjoys a weightless roll in the deep?

It is canon that people in my elder millennial age group were not raised to drink water: an entire generation trained to survive on sips from a communal school fountain. We are not like the young people today toting their Stanleys, skin plump from Sephora Drunk Elephant serums, glowing and hydrated within an inch of water intoxication. Sadly, I remain chronically dry.

My parents had a pool when we first moved to Florida, and we used it solidly for a year before losing interest. Teenage pool life was too high-testosterone for my personality, too much chicken, too much volleyball, too many competitive abs and hairy, hormonal piggy back rides. Can't a girl sit on the steps and marinate like a skirt steak? Why must we blow water at each other through the end of foam noodles? Why must I, the smallest one in the group, be Marco every time? Why is it fun and cute to push unsuspecting people into the deep end? Isn't that technically assault?

Over the years, I became a certified foot dangler, an expert hot-tub sitter, an accomplished side hanger. I've learned to say no to aggressive water slides and participation in aquatic sports, to limit beach trips or pool days that would require me to suck in my stomach performatively, remove body hair or pack anything larger than a bread box.

Then, weird: About a year ago, I started craving baths. The urge would come on unexpectedly, and I'd run the water. These were not the kind of candlelight wine baths seen in sitcoms and Hallmark movies, but elemental and primitive water sits in the middle of the day. I don't know how to explain it, but I needed to feel water around me. I'd sit in a scalding tub for, I don't know, 10 minutes. Just long enough to get a serotonin blast and not want to be in water anymore.

What if everyone who moves around in water has it wrong? What if water is best when you don't move? What if our bodies, made up of so much water, simply need to feel at home?

A couple weeks ago, we moved into a new house with a pool. I didn't know what I'd make of it, to be honest, and I still don't. Will it become another expensive forgotten element of suburbia? Will I smile from lawn chairs while guests have inexplicable fun pounding each other over the head with inflatables?

In a quiet moment, the temporal lobe called.

Water.

And I realized. There was a big ol' bathtub right there in the back of the house. I could wear my favorite bathing suit, which has a hole in it, and no one would see or care. I didn't have to fill any drink containers or coolers, make any small sandwiches, locate the rubbery slip-on shoes. I could just shuffle out a door and flop into the water like a pinniped marine mammal. I could rest my head on a floatie in the preferred stomach-sleeping position of my dehydrated generation, close my eyes and be weightless. No one named Kyle doing a cannonball. No one named Heather talking about her tan.

I waded in and let myself be carried. A new kind of buoyancy. Water.

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Stephanie Hayes is a columnist at the Tampa Bay Times in Florida. Follow her at @stephhayes on X or @stephrhayes on Instagram.

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