POOL
by Iskra Vukšić ︎︎︎Sea is not water, my father taught me, like all fathers and mothers from where I was born do. Sea is not water: there’s sea in my eyes. I swallowed sea, it is in my lungs. The sea is lukewarm. And to this day, in all languages, it scratches me when you announce that you will jump into the water. There are those who have died of thirst at sea. I have watched dry landscapes burn, launching their ashen tears into the shallows.
I drive through a concrete landscape, of apartment blocks and grey roads so young that there are no tiny sprouts of grass reaching through cracks yet. Three young men appear just an arm’s length from my car window. They are like sunken into concrete, tanned bare skin, leisurely resting their elbows on edges, sipping on one thing or another, gaze directed south and eyes squinting against the brutal sun. No young sprouts of grass and definitely no trees for shade. It is one of the hundreds of pools overlooking the sea.
When I was little I was terrified of jumping into sea. I stood at the edge staring onto the dark surface, not daring to break through. Under it, the possibility of encounter with everything I had learned about sea, and some of the things I had eaten, and many of those prospects were not good. I’d count down, followed by relief as I’d step over the edge. No way back now. Again and again. I loved jumping, but never once not aware of risk. My grandmother from the coast could not swim. What was sea to her? Neighbour? Resource? Threat? War? When she was fourteen she was put on a boat and evacuated across this endless unknown surface. Sea is not water because although rivers travel, drown and crash, your eyes will always have an anchor. What is sea when you buy it as view?
I imagine the men sitting in water looking at sea. Their body morphs into it a primordial shape. The skin of their toes wrinkles and gips firmly onto light blue tiles, rippled fingertips suck onto cocktail glass. All liquid circles, even as it moves into our body and through our cells, out again into man-made systems. Sea breathes, rivers flow, water cycles, rains, pours, tenses. The pool just paces back and forth like a caged lion. She overflows at the edge, tries to escape to quickly be caught again. Like a fish on ice she slows and waits for release.
A wave filmed in slow motion resembles more closely the sea that lives in my head throughout winter. Stretched like thick paste, like all that salt, like floating on your back without moving a limb. Everything else filmed at a distance is unimpressive like a moon through the phone lens. Everything in real time superimposed by noise discussing where to have lunch and who has the tickets and are the kids dangling a little too close to the railing. It is just a romanticisation, I know. I try to fight it, this is why I drive through the concrete in the first place. I soak up the ugliness that was built to accommodate the yearly pilgrimage for beauty. I confront my image of beauty of this land because its how we got here in the first place. It is the why of the ice cream stands, the trampolines, package tours, pools, the screaming, drinking, complaining, vibing, good mood, bad mood, keep ‘em happy, keep ‘em coming season. It is the how of the EU deal, rent due, kids fed, kids in school. It is blessing and curse, because when everyone wants a small piece of this, everyone else want a big piece of this until everything is pieces. Just the movement of a million feet and another million and another on the old stones of the old town that is sanded in our step. Stomped grapes make wine, pounded wool makes felt. What makes of shore and shallow under our weight? The sheer volume of us, that dry fact that like most facts in my motherland moves nothing but our heads from left to right.