The Weight of Water

We forget how to be light. As children, the body is not a vessel for labor or a map of scars; it is simply a way to move through the world. We run toward the water not because we are thirsty, but because the water is there, offering a mirror that does not judge. There is a specific, sharp joy in the skin meeting the cold. It is a brief erasure of everything else. The schoolbooks are left on the bank, the lessons of the day dissolve into the ripples, and for a few minutes, the gravity of the future does not exist. We spend the rest of our lives trying to return to that shore, to that state of being where the only thing that matters is the splash, the breath, and the sudden, cooling shock of the present. Does the water remember us once we have climbed out and walked away?

Shahnaz Parvin has captured this fleeting return to grace in her photograph titled Fun after School. It is a quiet reminder of the joy we leave behind in the shallows. Can you still hear the sound of the water?