The quotation was taken from Astrida Neimanis’ Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water (2012). (Image Simryn Gill Channel #15 2014)
Residence time is the time it takes to enter and leave an ocean.
Washed up, washed out, washed away. I look at the thinned skinned orange plastic clinging to sand. A sad sack. Hah. A message in a bottle to a system on the edge of break down
or was it break up. Water-logged, puddled in an ocean that won’t let go. Water and plastic and sand clutch each other in a jealous embrace. A watery caress becomes a tug that says you couldn’t leave me if you tried. A tug becomes an escape that says this is where I leave you, this is where you get off.
Orange plastic quietly seeps into water. It was always a toxic relationship, anyway. Did I ever tell you that North American breast milk also harbours
‘mercury, lead, benzene, arsenic, paint thinner, phthalates, dry-cleaning fluid, toilet deodorizers, Teflon, rocket fuel, termite poison, fungicides, and flame retardant’.
And that in our daily liquid acts – sweating, crying, breathing, lactating, bleeding, menstruating, urinating, digesting – we blur the edges of our bodies. I look again at the orange carcass, forebear and inheritor
creased and weathered as the sea that birthed it, burped it, secreted it. Under water we are in touch with ancestors, with ourselves as already ancestors. On a Saturday afternoon, my grandmother returns with three orange Sainsbury’s bags. She heaves them onto the counter with lined fingers. Unladen, one catches a breeze. It flies over the roof, over the garden fence, through Camden, south, south. A dejected balloon, drifting onto the murky surface of the Thames.
Anna Harris 