made of water

a geometry that curves //

the Pacific Ocean on film // November 2025

I’ve been thinking about time and memory and bodies of water and the water in our bodies. I am writing a much longer essay about this, the words leaking out of me day by day, week by week. I’ve put it on hold and come back to it again and again. This is the kind of slow writing that happens for me, sometimes.

I am a Leo moon, and on this full moon in Leo I am feeling the vastness of this moment, personally and collectively. Once, under hypnosis, I said that I needed to spend more time floating in water. I didn’t realize it would be in a womb of my own creation, the flood of my body in both ecstasy and grief, in love and in despair. I crave it all.

Scientists say that the water we drink, the water in rivers and oceans and lakes, formed in our solar system some 4.5 billion years ago. In other words, water holds the story of time. The molecular structure of water is bent, nonlinear. Relational. Its atomic parts link together in shifting lattices that form, break, and re-form: a geometry that curves, that refuses a singular state of being.

There are many theories of how all this water got here. Maybe Earth was born already carrying it, hidden in her deep interior. Or maybe it arrived in violence, delivered by a lost planet crashing into ours. Or it came from asteroids and meteorites burning their way into our skies. The total amount of water on Earth is almost constant, changing only by the smallest margins through chemical reactions, the burning of fossil fuels, volcanic activity, and respiration. With every breath between us, water dissolves into the air. A shared vapor, passing from body to body, one life to another.

We are living inside a world that wants our hardness: prisons and bodies forced against one another, words sharpened into weapons. State violence feeds on rigidity. Water undoes this logic. It does not respect borders. It moves around obstacles, seeps through cracks, changes states. Water is both hard and soft. A slippery shapeshifter. And I’m thinking about how channeling these properties… this softness, this adaptability and permeability… makes us difficult to control. As water beings, we can try to circumvent systems that rely on surveillance and extraction.

I am wondering if water is a kind of ancestor that doesn’t sit still, something that moves through us. The water contained within me has been elsewhere before. It has passed through other bodies, other centuries, other forms of living. The same water I touch today flowed through other empires. Regimes came and went. The water did not stop. It has been held and released again and again. I’m thinking about how I am made mostly of water, learning about the shape I am becoming next. I am less interested in where I end and more curious about what I am changing into.

Water doesn’t resolve itself. It circulates, evaporates, returns altered. It refuses a final form. I’m thinking about what it means to begin again, to become again. Not to arrive anywhere, but to remain in motion, staying porous to what has already passed through so many hands, through so many lives. Transformed but unbroken.