In the pool changing room, we fall in love.
My fingers trace the smooth blue tile on the wall as we walk in together, catching on jagged line after line of grout. This is how I would map your body, catching on and pausing at every next new tile of you. We swing our balmy limbs onto the benches, like synchronised divers; in this moment we are perfect score, perfect twins.
What do you swim when you get out of here? As in, in the pool, you slip between little waves and tell the water to bend to your motions. As in, in the changing room you alter the air between us, and the space thickens such that every vibration of your body tickles my skin. But who are you when you leave this inconstant place?
What if we fell into the ocean together, clingy chlorine turning into the teeth of salt air? We’d break under the surface and turn into seal women and I want to say I’d never steal your skin but that’s exactly what I’d do, keep you all to myself, and we would stay intertwining, undulating seals forever.
**
Over the years, I’ve watched him shrink from the mountain of my childhood to someone who is alarmingly my size, unnervingly weaker than me. Today he is the smallest I’ve ever seen him, his back curling in and face drooping helplessly. The hospital room lighting doesn’t do him any favours – “Sinhala Yellow” my mother had always called his skin, bygone beauty standard – but right now it just looks sallow and pained. His eyelids flutter gently.
When I was very very small, I would crouch in the bathtub – and then I swear this is true – I would push off the edge and swim laps – from end to end – like a swimming champion. That’s it, said my mother, when waves inevitably splashed over the ceramic lip, flooding the tiled floor. That’s it Small, we’re going to go and take a sea bath.
How exciting, I thought. The sea! I did not know what that was.
But when we got there, paralysis struck me. I was the god of bathwater – but this was very different from my porcelain domain. He had to crouch down and promise me, No Small, I promise it’s not trying to catch you. Yes Small, it’s moving without you even touching it, but I promise, it’s not alive. It’s not trying to hurt you.
Distrustingly, I inched toward the tossing waves. Knee deep initially, with the next swell white foam was tickling my waist, no extra motion of my own necessary. And then – little salty tears that could never measure up to the massiveness surrounding me. He came and snatched me up – committed Sea Bath Rescue. Why is it moving so much Thaththi? Why doesn’t it ever stop? It won’t let me breathe.
It’s okay Small. One day it won’t feel so difficult.
I don’t know when it was that he stopped being able to pick me up. In the hospital room, it’s his fragile fingers that skim the tops of her IV plugged hands, trembling against the future. She is more machine than woman at the moment, hooked up to a heart rate monitor, drip slung up, an electric bed to move her forward and down. He shivers by her side. Glittery eyes. Diagnosis like a perfume has permeated the air, climbed lazy steps up her spine bones and wrapped around her stomach, but it is buffeting his body.
I stand in the doorway.
I crouch next to an ocean.
I am a void unable to negotiate with his smallness. (her stillness)
Can’t you rescue me again? The water has come up to my waist again and this time it’s squeezing.
**
Tonight, we fall asleep to Notting Hill.
I first met you at the swimming pool but I think of you in terms of the forest.
“I’m also just a girl…” my head slips onto her shoulder and she shifts so the curve of my head rests on a divot in her body that’s been made just for me, “standing in front of a boy…” our limbs have woven together under her blankets and I cannot begin to discern when she ends and I begin. We are like those trees that have grown irrevocably around each other, marriage trees that have committed inosculation. Inosculation, when the branches or roots of two trees grow together, derived from the Latin osculari, to kiss into/inward/against. I could not count how many times I have kissed into you.
Neat folds of seafoam wash right up to my toes, the rush of water drowning out the rest of Julia Roberts’ words, and so too go all the years of my life. In 1755, Lisbon, a woman peers into the home of a hermit crab. Her great curls flit in and out of a dance with the breeze. She places the crab down gently, and watches it scuttle away, until it is lost in a sea of shell-parts. Salt melts onto her lips and confesses that it is her time. She lies along the breath of the tide, rolling up into her own multitude, rings of skin and mollusc shell pearlescing her small, fleshy body.
Kneeling in the wet sand, it was so easy to crawl right under the next swell, and draw a wave up over her body like a cool, speckled blanket.
Writer | Venumi Gamage ’26 | vthotagodagamage26@amherst.edu
Editor | Claire Macero ’25 | cmacero25@amherst.edu