There was a summer. One small, salty summer in that pocket of time where I finally settled into my new age like a skin. Sixteen. Later that year, I stopped eating. 

The cool water would burrow down my body, following the serpentine length of my spine, filling me, just barely, from the bottom; a drop into what I always understood was an ocean of unbending hunger. I drank a glass before school and a bottle during lunch, when all my friends would gather, sitting contorted and cramped on the cold linoleum, chewing. I had a glass before dinner, so I wouldn’t eat too much of whatever my father made, just enough to satisfy both of us. 

“You eat like a little bird,” he would say in warped Spanish, adapted from what my mother said when I picked at my plate: Come como pajarito. Water, in those days, was the only thing that fed me. 

Even now, I think I must have a little bit more water in me than other people do, that my body is something of a tiny river, my veins marking the passage of the water as it rushes up and down, pulsing to the current of my heart. 

***

The feeling of being full of water brings me back to that summer in Mexico, when I almost drowned. 

Swimming was not new to me. I had been swimming in Mexican waters since I could hold my breath and count to ten in my mother’s tongue. But always with someone else, often my brothers. They had always been better, swam deeper. That one summer, I was alone, and I wanted to be like them. I wanted to go deeper, swim further. I wanted to know what men knew. 

Before then, I had never understood the enormity of a tide, of a rocking insistence; of the power inherited from being stubborn and relentless. 

The water grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. 

***

There is a poem by Langston Hughes that makes me feel he knew what it’s like being chased by the slippery hands of water: “Suicide’s note.” 

“The calm, 

Cool face of the river 

Asked me for a kiss.”

The poem has no gender, but when I read it, the river was a woman. Only women know the restlessness of will. 

Langston Hughes, oh, how I wish I could ask you: What do you think? If the river asked you again, would you kiss her? Would you write your soft poetry about tasting sweet lips, Harlem swirling by your feet, and describe the thick slush of water as it reaches toward you? Toward a person who has known rivers?

Through hollowed breaths, I spat salt onto the hot sand, sending back what the earth had given me, and it felt like a sort of poetry. 

The brief wonder of enduring life in the face of death. A woman’s face. At least, I like to think that it was. 

I turned on my back and let the sun sear me, a new baptism. I was heaving and shaking from exhaustion, but more alive and fuller than I’d ever been. 

That day, I learned something that only nearly losing a life in the quietest way can teach you: that to be tenacious is the only true honesty. To be honest about what you are and have people swim in your danger anyway is of a singular, mortal beauty. 

***

I was named after the Mayan goddess of the moon, Ixchel, who controlled the tides. If you look it up, there are always a million different definitions of her powers, of what people thought she was. 

The goddess of love and femininity. The goddess of earth and war. Bones on her skirt, claws for fingers. The goddess of medicine and healing. Regardless, she always has a snake nestled atop her head, the symbol of the womb. She is always a woman, and always Mayan. Her countless statues kneel straight and pour thick water from a jar onto the soil in an effort to grow. 

I think about that at times. What it must take to be a million things at once, yet remain singular. I think about her endless ways of being. That to have forms is really to be formless. To be contained and yet uncontainable. Like the water she discharges: every space it has lived in has been at the end of something. A hollow, a well. An eternity spent in the empty. I think of how water can rest there and fill it. How humans look at its vacuous space, its dents, its ever-changing, ever-filling hollows, and call them vast. And still, how nothing can be vast within itself. How a body can only ever be the question to its own answer. A goddess, yes. But always, in the end, a woman. Every ocean answers to one name.

***

There was a summer. One small, salty summer in that pocket of time where I shed the year again, like a skin. Twenty, and old enough to learn from the body. Heavier from the life I had experienced.

I once asked about the difference between the sea and the ocean, in a time before I understood that the sea was only a fraction of the ocean, the part that washes the shore like a new day. The part that runs towards a freedom it can never obtain. It is another thing split through definition. 

That summer, I didn’t swim. I only stopped and floated, letting her guide me where she wished, trusting in her tenacity. A tiny river, in a fractured sea, in an empty ocean. Small summers, all around.