It is a rare night when water does not come to me in the form of dreams. It fills the basins of bathing tubs and the land surrounding me. I marvel at its form rising with ease through gravity, encompassing form until it disappears and absorbs. “Did you know water can remember you?” a friend shared on the eve of the solstice.

How can it not? Water is memory. When you pour it into a glass, it becomes the cylinder. When you expose it to music, it becomes the song. Exposed to fire, water becomes heat. Ice, stasis. We move through liquid limbs with the structure of bones. At least 70% water, we are living memories. The memory of what once was, and still is. Of what will become, and has never left time.

We are song, fire, heat, and ice. We are splinters of pain and the symphony of love in one body. Except, we are not just one body. We drink the tears of our ancestors and those that have been lost to form. We drink memory every day to fill the thirst inside. Expelling with the need to release not just our own, but those that have collected inside of us. We are memory in watered form.

In an instant, a molecule of water can transform. The shattered atoms of anger can coalesce into a star of love. Our bodies are capable of reform. Old patterns, learning new. We orchestrate the symphony of our own songs. The play of memory, ours to mold and break down. What songs do you sing to your cells? What memories do you ask water to carry for you? When I forget, I whisper love into the vessel and drink it into my cells. I sing “Om” through the well of the throat until it sinks into the womb for rebirth. Remembering I am the keeper of water and its memories, at least for some time. Time that dances in chaos or harmony inside of me, waiting to be released and rejoined in another form. Water, older than time. Held, for a moment, in me.