Living with water. // Distant thunder, constant but low, and the atmospheric awareness of a storm. Not here yet, the rain, and it may not come, but shadows gather on the northwest horizon, toward the higher altitudes, near Pupuan.
Taking a (hot) shower outdoors under (cool) sprinkles of rain. The contrast is reviving. With bits of fern and mossy surface surroundings, I feel like a sea nymph. (The soap “includes sea salt, seaweed, and argan oil”.) Like a Nereid, like Achilles' mother, Thetis, and as soon as she enters my mind, I am overpowered by her perspective, her native tenderness toward, sometimes ownership over, Achilles. There’s one story that she dipped him into the Styx, holding him by the ankle. The other story is that she took him in secret every night, when he was a baby, to burn away his mortality. With flame, and the desire for her child to live forever.
The fish love the dry season that never was, the rainy season come early. One day there were splinters of light in the canal, magnetic slivers of translucent peach and orange shooting like stars through the murky green, sun-dappled water. The next day there were more. (We feed them table scraps and leftover cat food, they basically wash dishes.) Now, through their private (unwitnessed by us) reproductive routines, they have filled the canal with their glittering babies, from tiny newborns to about thumb-sized, which scatter at every hint of motion. Meanwhile, the adults watch me do yoga. Their eyes do not blink. Their mouths open and close, attentive expressions. They really do watch. Some are spiny and the color of mud. Some are bright orange, spattered with black, the mouths of these ones like to gape wide open. Some are pale, almost white, with long, diaphanous fins. They linger underneath tangled and raggedy roots. They float past, with their streamers of chiffon, these otherworldly angels. Fish energy is quiet and serene, arhythmic nibbles at nothing, until it is lightning fast, or surprisingly strong, the peck and pull at seeds of grass, a torpedo aimed at the next shadow down. A heavy splash, ker-plunk, in the dark of the night, and no other symbol than that.
The canal (so far) runs around two sides of the house, catching the rain that cascades from the roof. To us, it’s a strategy for living with water. But rain is their element, their power, and nothing makes them more at home. We are surrounded, in sleep, by the dreaming of fish. And when it rains, we sleep in a different dimension, of warmth and light, ensconced beneath their waterfall.