Work Text:
She is seven years old and refuses to get out of the pool.
Her fingers are wrinkled, and her lips are blue, but if she gets out of the public pool now, she’ll have to go home, and bathtubs just aren’t the same.
“Joana!” her mother yells. Joana flips around to face her, gives her a wave, and dives back under. She swims to the other side of the pool, keeping her head in the water as she does. She wants to see how long she can hold her breath – she hopes it’s forever, because then that would make her a mermaid, right?
When she gets to the other end of the pool, her dad is there waiting for her. He’s crouched, his knees sticking out over the water and his hands dangling between them. She’s expecting him to be mad, but he has a little smile on his face – the one that he wears when he asks if she wants to go get ice cream.
She grabs the edge of the pool and lets her legs float on the water. “Are you going to tell me to get out of the water, Papa?”
He nods; she goes to sink down into the water again, but he holds her wrists fast.
“I’m sorry Jojo, but we have to go eat dinner.”
She pouts. “Can’t we eat in the pool?”
Her father laughs. “Eating and swimming at the same time will give you a really bad tummy ache.”
She notices the growl in her stomach and ponders this. She decides to negotiate.
“Can we get ice cream after?” she asks.
Her father leans forward and looks at her with eyes matching her own. He looks so serious, she’s afraid he may say no.
“Of course, we can, Jojo. But only if you get out of the pool right now and go let your mama dry you off.” He lifts her up out of the pool by her wrists in one swoop, then places her on dry ground. (She thinks of how she can convince her mother to let her come back to the pool tomorrow morning.)
--
She is fourteen years old and wondering if she can drown in a shower. She read somewhere that it was possible to drown in a puddle, so a shower can’t be that much different, right?
She sits in the ceramic bathtub and tries to catch her breath. She takes gulps of oxygen into her lungs and pushes them out through her noise – in, hold, and out – just like the school counsellor told her. She still can’t breathe, and it hurts. (In her lungs, her stomach, her head, her legs. It hurts everywhere.)
Her hair hangs in her face, the strands cold as they stick to her cheeks. Her body is warm, but it shakes violently; she distantly thinks of getting a blanket but the idea of anything on her skin makes her want to crawl out of it. She watches the water funnel down the drain and wonders how she could possibly be drowning when her back is still dry.
--
She is seventeen years old and underwater. She is staring at the prettiest girl in the world and wondering if she has the courage to kiss her. She is staring, she knows she is – but so is Cris, and that makes it all alright.
She lets her eyes trace the divots of Cris’ face, mapping every pore and ridge to memory. She notices a thin white line on her forehead, right below the hairline. A scar, a small one. Cris probably got it when she was a kid - Split her head open on something, was it a brother’s fault? (Did she cry, did her mother kiss it better?)
For a second, Joana is hit with the realization of Cris having a life before this. A time in which she was not hopelessly loved by Joana, so ardently adored. She wants to know everything about that time, wants Cris to tell her about it, wants to be part of everything that follows.
(She decides it starts now.)
Now, she is kissing the prettiest girl in the world because she needs it to breathe. She’s glad to have the excuse to never let go.
--
She is eighteen years old and floating on the surface of the Mediterranean. She feels her skin warm under the sun and has never felt so happy to be alive.
“What are you doing?” Cris asks above her. (Joana tamps down the urge to reach out and touch; if she moves, she’ll capsize.)
“Floating,” she replies.
Cris hums. “Yes, yes I see that.” Joana hears the smile in her voice, but keeps her eyes closed to the Mallorcan sun above her.
“Would you like to join me?” She wiggles her fingers, moves her knees a little, relaxes into the embrace of the sea and wonders why she hasn’t been doing this all her life. Cris laughs, and Joana feels the ripples meet her arm as Cris melts into the water.
They rest like that – Joana has no idea for how long. She lets her body relax and focuses on the girl breathing next to her, then spreads her arms away from her sides and feels for Cris’ hand. Cris hums as she strokes the pads, the knuckles, the curve of her wrist. Joana can picture Cris, right now: eyes closed, arms outstretched, palms open to the sky. She can see her hair fanning out in the water, almost white in the afternoon light. She sees the waves lapping at her sides, her body lightly undulating with the waves.
She takes Cris’ hand in hers and pulls until she feels Cris’ shoulder against hers. She rests their hands on her stomach and takes a breath. Takes a moment to marvel at how she has worked so hard for so long for something she didn’t know. She thinks that the goal may have been this. This feeling of serenity, of calm, of belonging to the world and having it embrace you.
Life’s all about the longing, isn’t it? About the hands, about the subtle glances. It’s all about wishing for warm dawns with someone to hold. She had spent so long desperate for fingertips on her wrists and now that she has them, she feels like she can breathe.
She keeps their hands, hugs them tight to her chest. Cris’ hands belong to her now – each ivory knuckle to kiss, each vein to trace. All hers. (She doesn’t think she’ll ever give them back.)
--
She is twenty years old and standing in the Atlantic Ocean.
The waves rush to meet her legs. They hurdle towards her, picking up speed and debris as they flee the horizon. It’s not quite daytime yet – behind her, to the East, she feels the sun paint her spine with streaks of gold – and the sky ahead of her is still dark. A deep shade of blue, she thinks, like a bruise. Like the ones that litter her knuckles sometimes, or the one that bloomed on Cris’ knee when she fell skateboarding. (Joana had felt awful, was almost crying with the guilt and had to fight to keep the sobs in her throat, but Cris only laughed and said she’d gotten worse from her brothers. Joana had kissed that bruise every day until it faded.)
She decides that, in the future, she would like to live near the ocean. She’d have to be able to walk to it whenever she wanted, because this cannot be the last time she sees the sunrise over the ocean. She thinks she could watch the waves catch flame every morning and never tire of the sight.
She wonders if Cris would want a house near the ocean. Something a few blocks in from the beach, so that they don’t have to deal with tourists taking pictures of their home. A small place, but with a balcony and big windows and a real dining table, not just one for the kitchen. She can picture waking up with Cris every morning, with the sun warming the bed sheets and lulling them back to sleep. She can see them making dinner together and bickering over who washes the dishes, sees them jostling for space in front of the mirror when they brush their teeth. She wants to pick out the colours for their cabinets and their bedroom and their bathroom and she wants to paint every wall with Cris right next to her – if they have a paint fight, so be it.
It scares her how clearly she can see a future with Cris. She can see them growing up together, growing old together. She thinks maybe she’s not scared of the future but scared that planning it out doesn’t terrify her.
See, the future used to scare her more than anything. It would leave her shaking and paralyzed of rational thought, leaving her with only dark hypotheticals. There was a time when she didn’t think she would make it past eighteen, so the future never even made it on the radar. But right now, with the ocean as her witness, she lets herself think of her life decades down the line. She lets her ideas settle into her bones, lets them rest there and ground her to her own life.
She’s jostled from her thoughts when she hears splashes behind her. She spins around to see Cris walking towards her, her hair falling down around her shoulders and her eyes still hazy with sleep. Cris grabs her hand; Joana lets it be taken. She thinks if Cris touches her any more than that she’ll dissolve and float away. They stand like that, sand receding through their toes and the morning sun warming their backs. Joana’s mind goes quiet, and she revels in the silence. She strokes Cris’ thumb and asks the universe how it’s possible that one person could hold so much of her heart in their hands.
Joana breaks the silence when she figures out the answer.
“I’ve never been to the ocean.”
Cris looks at her and Joana wonders if she knows her eyes match the colour of the waves. “No?”
“The Mediterranean, of course. With my parents, with you in Mallorca. But never an ocean.”
“So…” Cris says, rocking back and forth on her toes and swinging their joined hands. “What do you think?”
Joana looks back out at the ocean and takes a deep breath. “It reminds me of myself. Intense, you know?”
She feels Cris hold her hand a little tighter. “It’s calm, sometimes, angry others. It’s always intense,” she continues.
“And always beautiful.”
Joana looks back at Cris, just in time to see her smile. It’s the smile only Joana gets to see – only there for a moment, subtle enough anyone would miss it if they weren’t constantly looking for it. It’s small, but it reaches her eyes and makes her whole face light up. It’s not performative, not meant to show anyone how happy she is; a smile that Cris can’t help. Joana wonders if Cris knows she sees it – watches for it, actually – and catalogues each sighting in her memory, brings them up to mind when she falls asleep at night or starts doubting real things. She uses those smiles to remind herself that their relationship is real, that Joana’s feelings are real, that their love exists and affects her and Cris and the people around them.
Cris looks away. Joana wishes she wouldn’t, wishes she could just stare into those eyes all the time and not deal with the depths of her longing. Instead, she hums in agreement. “I don’t think anything else in this world is capable of such violence and beauty at the same time.”
She says it quietly, like she’s speaking it into the waves, urging them to take the words away to never be repeated, to never be heard. (Cris hears it though – Cris hears everything.)
Joana feels a hand leave hers and an arm wrap around her waist. Cris’ fingers rub around her hipbone, beat a tattoo into the skin. Joana lifts her arm to put it around Cris and hugs her tight against her ribcage. She rests her hand against Cris’ neck and lets herself get tangled in the golden hair. She doesn’t turn her head though; neither of them do. They stay there, holding each other, staring out at the horizon. Joana feels the waves break against her shins, thinks she can taste the salt on her tongue and in her eyes. She plays with the hairs on Cris’ neck and feels their breathing align, inhaling at the same time and exhaling as if one body.
Joana thinks she could stay here, like this, for eternity. Feel the sun rise from the edge of the world and watch it sink into the horizon every single day until it never comes back up. (If she can’t have that, however, she thinks she would be content with just one more minute of feeling like her love could drown whole oceans.)