“In memories it is always blue, slow, light. Why?” (Bachelard 127)

Franz Hellens:
“My memory is fragile; I quickly forget the contour, the feature; only the melody remains within me. I have difficulty retaining the object, but I cannot forget the atmosphere, which is the sonority of things and beings.” (Bachelard 135)

Water is home. Not just any water, but the extreme surge of flood and ebb where northern salt water meets muddy river water. The memory of the sea lives in my body as slow, deep, blue, resonant and illuminated. I am oriented towards the sea. I feel the magnetic pull of salt water at my blood, as if my connection to the pull of moon or the pull of the cosmos is stronger on the shore than inland. Our asymmetry concentrates all our sensory organs to orient forward and all my sensory organs orient seaward.

Memory: saltwater from my eyes matched and trumped by the salt spray of sea.
Memory: shore scents of kelp, receding wave, burst seafoam, distant-born wind.
Memory: luminous green waves as the clear flood water pushed against the east wind, the sandbars, the river ebb; confused seas, choppy waters, wave pyramids collided and burst, simply burst into air; saltair filtered through my curled-back eyelashes as I looked into the wind, looked with the sun setting rays, stinging.
Memory: eyes unfocused at the frothing white raging horses of the boat wake.
Memory: fullness, safety, relief of high tide; excitement, danger, awe at the early a.m. sisterhood of high tide and wind; expectation, magic, curves of slacktide hightide fish.
Memory: the sleep of the fish, the waterdreams of waterbodies held in the cradle of the hull; a return.
Memory: body in a body; salt skin girl enveloped by liquid light waves.
Memory: breath.
Memory: motion.
Memory: light.