The Salt on the Skin
The memory of summer is not a sight; it is the sting of salt drying on my shoulders and the sudden, sharp chill of water against overheated skin. I remember the way the air tasted—heavy with ozone and the metallic tang of wet concrete. There is a specific sound to a body breaking the surface of a pool, a hollow, percussive thud that vibrates in the chest long after the ripples have smoothed over. We spend our lives trying to hold onto the feeling of weightlessness, that brief second when the world stops pulling at our limbs and we are suspended in a cool, liquid embrace. It is a frantic, beautiful surrender. We are never more present than when we are drenched, gasping for air, with the sun burning bright and indifferent against our wet hair. Does the body ever truly lose the memory of that first, reckless plunge into the deep?
Ahmed Galal has captured this exact sensation in his work titled Freeze. It carries the weight of a summer afternoon that refuses to end. Can you feel the spray against your own skin?
