Saltwater

They say that saltwater is very healing, that if you dip your cuts into the stinging water they close faster. But saltwater also dehydrates. It leaves you thirsty but keeps you covered. Something like that.

Don't tell Adrienne, but I dipped my hair in saltwater today. I clogged the sink with a washcloth and looked up the salinity of the Gulf of Thailand and did the math incredibly incorrectly and filled the basin with a haphazard, hand-wavey, eyeballed cup full of table salt for the water and I put in my head. 

Sidebar: for someone who does calculus for a living, I can sure screw up an arithmetic problem. I'll blame it on jetlag and hormones and stress because I can and that's what I do every day anyway.

Anyway.

Most of the world and most of us is water, and most of that water is salty. Can't get by without it, can't cry without it, can't sweat, can't bleed. And my Fraggle Rock curls look their best when they've been soaked in grimy saltwater.

While in Tonsai Beach, I spent most of my time by myself under the water. I went into a cave and met a friend called Hanna, and then we went into the water together. After that, we hiked to the top of the craggy rocks and the saltwater ran out of our pores in single-file rivers. I couldn't get enough of it and at the same time, I couldn't get rid of it fast enough. I was saturated.

I drowned my phone splashing in the saltwater at midnight, looking for crabs so that the local climbing instructor could put them to sleep by rubbing their bellies, and dodging beach spotlights to search for luminous plankton. We didn't find any, but I soaked my shorts and then the phone in my pocket lost one functioning speaker. Luckily, it had come with two.

Then in Otres Beach, I used the saltwater as a hideaway. This is because I couldn't sit on the lovely wooden swing, couldn't lie on the beach cushions, couldn't sit on the barstools without being touched or harassed or called out or bothered. I respect the hustle, but I can't help everyone and I can't relax when this is happening, of course. I found that the only way to hide from this was to run into the ocean; floating on my back and diving into the murkiness until the entrepreneurs had moved on.

Sometimes I would come back to the shore because there was a dog who lived nearby, and he liked to lean on me and lick the saltwater off of my face while we were battered by the breaking waves. And that onslaught was far more kind than the reality of the financial imperialism surrounding us or the women who wanted to rip out my leg hairs with thread.

But then one night, after we had established some sort of a dirtbag, misfit family in our jungle huts on the sand, we woke each other up during the wee hours to hunt for plankton again. Slipping out of swimsuits and shuffling bare-skinned into the warm saltwater, the motion of our fluttering fingers and toes set off a biological alarm within the clouds of tiny plankton.

It was like swimming in glitter. Every time we moved, the plankton set off their flashing, silent sirens. From the pictures I had seen, I didn't understand how dim or small or elusive they would be. I thought it would be more like the glimmering medusae of luminous jellyfish, congealing in an almost indistinguishable mess of slime near the mangroves and glowing blue against the moonlight.

But this was different. This was an open beach, swimming in stars. We could look up into the November sky above and then below, and see a similar phenomenon. Not physically, but empirically. 

We never had much luck getting the salt or sand out of anything while we were there, but I think that's what the artists call "aesthetic." Perhaps the thinly-veiled snobs would call it "charming," but it's what we called "affordable." Slipping through our fingers, the huts won't exist next month...but regardless of the uncontrollable things happening down in southern Cambodia, we got our rent's worth for our time on the sea.

They say saltwater is very healing, that if you dip your head underneath, there exists another world entirely. 

Whoever they are, I think they're right.