Being of Water

A guest piece from Paula Stäbler on water and childhood memories

Now, during the cold, dark months of the year – when the first step outside my door makes me bristle – I miss the summer heat. Being able to shed clothing, to feel the sun smiling on my skin. Most of all, I miss being able to float. Lying on my back in a lake, intermittently moving my limbs so as not to drown, feeling the gentle waves swaying my hair back and forth like algae close to the surface. I miss being one with water. Showers and baths are a good alternative, but rain is not. I like to be submerged – completely surrounded by water; I don’t like to be wet. Stepping out of the shower requires strength, the same strength I channel when I swim to the shore, hoisting myself up into the cold air, droplets glistening, reflecting the sun.

I grew up in a valley town surrounded by a river. The only way to leave was over a bridge and up a hill. When floods came – as they always, inevitably, would – the whole town was disconnected from the surrounding villages. There was a flood the year I was born, in August 2002. There are markers around town to show where the ground floors of houses were underwater, specifying how high the water reached. When I was little, listening to my grandparents and parents talk about it, it seemed so high, so far-reaching beyond my head. Even now as an adult, it still feels impossibly high. Standing next to the shallow river, the clear water revealing the ground, it feels absurd that it could grow this much, that it could swallow and take me.

To this day, it’s called the Jahrhunderthochwasser. It means a flood like this only happens once a century, but there’s weight to that term. It’s as if we had survived something grand, after already surviving the turn of the millennium. The world didn’t wait for us to get used to it. We entered this new age with disasters, the world warning us, preparing us for what it had in store. But we didn’t listen, didn’t wait to declare the worst flood of the next 100 years. We couldn’t imagine it happening again, or to happen again more drastically. It’s not a surprise that our hubris, our sheer arrogance, was tested ten years later with another flood – now also called a 100-year flood. And then another one, again ten years later. Three 100-year floods in twenty years.

I wonder if I made the earth angry by being born.

Or maybe I called the water to me, and it welcomed me. It knew that I would see it as a friend, and it came to me. I used to be able to see the river from my bedroom, but as our house was on a small hill, we never feared that it would reach us, no matter how often I fantasised about being swept and carried away by the gentle waves. And they were always gentle. Even when they rose, submerging the field on the other side, climbing up to the village opposite our shore and ruining the cows’ grazing space, I never felt in danger.

On summer holidays to the Baltic Sea or Italy, I would happily swim in the ocean or the pool our house provided. I spent hours in the water, my obsession with H20: Just Add Water manifesting itself as I turned into a pretend-mermaid. My fingers pruned while my grandfather quizzed me on basic Spanish vocabulary, comparing it to his knowledge of Italian. On long excursions through the hot Italian countryside, complaining about the unsalted butter and the bland bread, I longed for the cooling water up on our hill-top vacation home.

My family used to affectionately call me a Wasserratte, a water rat, but whenever I told my classmates I loved swimming, they would doubt me. Because as time went on my body changed, and I changed, and I stopped looking forward to being submerged. My chest was small and the thought of accentuating that by revealing my skin, only covering that small space, made me feel sick.

I know no one would have really paid attention to my body, too concerned with their own. And yet, when we went on a class trip to the swimming pool, I pretended I had forgotten my swimsuit. I was also on my period, my first or second year of ever having one, and I was still impossibly ashamed to say it out loud. What will they – the boys – think? Will they make fun of me? It’s a curious, terrifying thing to be menstruating as a young adolescent, not wanting to be found out, all social expectations, prejudices, and shameful attributes associated with periods suddenly pressing down. Even if no one has commented on it, there’s an unspoken agreement of secrecy. I didn’t even tell my female friends (partly because I had already started the “I forgot my swimsuit”-lie), even if they might have understood.

And so, I stood outside, sometimes sitting with our teacher marking another class’s tests, watching my friends jump from diving boards, climbing three, five, then ten meters, daring each other to make a big splash. I waited for them to come down the slides, going three times before they had to take a break. At some point, I felt a sudden warm splash in my underwear. I quickly fled from the pool into the changing rooms, thankful for everyone stuck on high platforms or claustrophobic tubes. I could feel the wet, cooling blood spreading on my thighs, a sticky, uncomfortable sensation. Before I reached my locker, before I got away with cleaning myself and hiding the evidence without being discovered, I found myself standing in front of one of my friends. His hair was still wet, and he might have said something to me, but all I could think was don’t move, or he’s going to hear the squelching between your legs. I thought anything – a pained grimace, a panicked gesture, nervous laughter – would betray my bleeding, would humiliate me in front of someone who, while being a friend, still had the tendencies of a thirteen-year-old boy to joke about girls’ bodies and discomfort.

I think back to this moment now, still occasionally uncomfortable in my own body, having lost my teenage body that didn’t gain weight, always slightly too small but still too much for my brainwashed younger self. When I bleed now, I don’t hesitate to tell people. When I bleed now, I don’t forget my swimsuit. I thank the women who invented the moon cup that allows me now to sink into the Hampstead Heath ponds in London with ease and comfort.

Now, in the cold months of the year, with March slowly beginning, crocus flowers assuring me that soon, soon we can stay, soon the sun will touch you too, and the temperature creeping up, I cannot wait to become one with water again. To let the water inside my body return to its home, to become translucent and warm floating on my back, my limbs instinctively bobbing with the movement of other swimmers around me, being under- and overwater at the same time.