The Weight of Water
By: Lindsay Benster
The first thing grief steals is rhythm. The heartbeat stumbles. The pipes hesitate, unsure how to hold silence. Even the rain loses its measure, falling to a song it no longer remembers. They say water is cleansing, and maybe it is. But they forget what it demands. To stand in it. To feel the sting. To keep scrubbing at what will not wash away. Water carries memory. It circles the earth and comes back changed, each pass through sediment leaving remnants, each downpour mixing with pollutants, heavy with everything it’s touched. The same water that once carried ships through violent storms now tepidly trails down my cheek while I whisper I’m fine to no one. Tears are the body’s Morse code, a wet tapping from the inside. Mine spell please, stay, don’t make me learn how to live with this. They burn on their way out. Not metaphor. Salt meeting skin. Grief sterilizing what it ruins.
People call crying release, as if pain were a valve you could twist shut. But mine leaks through small talk, through laughter that cracks halfway, through the throat still holding your name like a splinter. The body always knows first. It floods quietly while the mind still bargains. When the tears stop, I try running. Someone once said movement heals. They forgot to mention how much it hurts. So I run. From the house, from mirrors, from the hours that refuse to end. Grief keeps pace beside me, silent and tireless. It never breaks a sweat. Mine pours out like confession. Every step is an argument with gravity. My lungs taste like metal.
At the corner, a car slows beside me, same make and color as yours. The wrong person waves. For a second, my chest forgets. Then I keep running. By the time I reach home, the sky has already started to break. It rains the way grief does; suddenly, without ceremony. I walk without an umbrella because staying inside feels dishonest. Maybe if the sky falls apart, I won’t feel so alone in it. The streets shine like open wounds. Each reflection offers a version of me I have outgrown: the one who thought love could outlast loss, the one who believed endings had reason. The rain is almost kind, the way it keeps touching what I’d rather hide.
When I reach the door, the storm follows me in. The shower is the only place I let it happen. Four tiled walls, a drain, water loud enough to cover sound. I turn the knob until heat blurs pain. The first drop lands like an order. Then another. Then a language I no longer need to translate. Steam rises, ghosting the mirror. Water traces collarbones, wrists, the hollow under my throat where prayer once lived. It insists on touching what hurts. I let it. No one can tell if you are crying in the shower. Even the tile understands.
When the water cools, I stay still. Goosebumps lift across my arms, the body spelling what the mouth cannot. The mirror clears slowly, unwilling to face me. I look anyway. Pale. Rinsed. Not clean. Grief never leaves. It only changes form. Later, I am washing a dish when the dam finally gives. One second I am upright, the next I am on the floor. The plate shatters, a sound too precise to be accidental. The body collapses around its own noise. There is no speech left, only water finding exits. The air thickens. The walls sweat. Or maybe I do. It’s hard to tell where the flood begins. People talk about bottom as if it’s fixed. It isn’t. You hit it again and again until you stop naming the fall.
I remember your voice. It comes like surf, gentle, then brutal. I remember pretending to breathe normally. I remember pretending. The flood takes what it wants: the composure from my sentences, the photographs from the walls. When it’s done, everything glistens and nothing feels whole. Afterward, the room is a mix of rain and metal. I wipe my face and can’t tell what’s what—tears, sweat, sink water. It doesn’t matter. The flood never cares where it comes from, only that it found a way out.
Morning arrives without asking. The floor is dry. The air feels emptied. It’s strange how quickly the world forgets what drowned you. I make tea and watch the steam rise. Maybe that’s what healing is: vapor finding its own sky. Quiet, invisible, steady. Grief doesn’t leave anymore. It lives here. Sometimes it hums while I move. Sometimes it waits at the table. Sometimes it sleeps. I laugh once, startled by the sound. Joy, after all that water. It doesn’t erase what’s gone; it just lives beside it. Every trace of moisture keeps record. The fog on glass, sweat on skin, the small cloud my breath makes in cold air. Proof that I am still here. Maybe that’s the point.
We are built mostly of water so sorrow has somewhere to go, so it can move through us without taking everything. I used to think strength meant staying dry. Now I know it means learning to breathe underwater. The body predicts its own weather, the ache before rain, the pressure that warns of change, the stillness after collapse. Maybe we are our own climates. Maybe loss is just weather that never clears but still allows light through. I step outside. The sky feels familiar. The air tastes clean, the kind of clean that follows ruin. I tilt my face to the wind. For once, it doesn’t sting. Grief evaporates slowly, but it does. What remains glimmers. The quiet shine of someone still here, still human, still water.
Lindsay is a mental health clinician and current doctoral intern in clinical psychology, with a background in clinical research on psychological interventions for treatment-resistant mental illnesses. She writes to translate the chaos of living into language and to remind others they’re not alone in what they feel. Deeply interested in the complexities of human emotion and experience, she approaches poetry through this lens, often exploring the subtle tensions of the inner world.
Her work has appeared in several journals and anthologies, including The Alcala Review, the 2018 California Emerging Writers Series, Fat Daddy’s Farm, 42 Stories Anthology, Book Smuggler’s Den, You Might Need to Hear This, Poet’s Choice – I Ain’t Dead Yet, Scapegoat Review, and Quibble Lit.