They are present in seawater, seaweed, magnesium sulfate; they restore, preserve and make potent.
Solutions
Saline. Sometimes, the solution is that simple.
So they tell me to cry it out. Salts. In a panic, he seeks reference points. He suggests going to the river. By this he means swim in it, a tidal river. Salts. I think maybe I’ll just go to work, work a long day, work until I stumble home on sore toes and a bladder full to bursting. Sweat. Salts.
Maybe, I think, maybe, it is all much simpler than it appears.
I plan the cake I will make for her next birthday. The recipe calls for one teaspoon of salt. I cross it off. Instead, I write two.
Saline. Sometimes, the solution is that simple.
Bath
I have started taking baths again. I light candles and open the window a crack. I don’t have time for this, but I make time for this. I box out time so I can fall into time. I assume I took baths as a child, though I don’t remember them much. I assume these baths were not too hot, and quick to cool as I splished and splashed, supervised, ecstatic. Since then, I have seen baths in paintings and texts. Sometimes, like in New York City, I have lived in homes where the baths block doorways and smell of rot. Once, I saw the baths at Pompeii. This struck me. I have read about hydrotherapies for the sick and dying, like at Hot Springs in Arkansas, or at towns up and down the coasts; towns as retreats, capitalizing on fresh air, ecological purity, etc. Who is the freshest of them all? I even sat in a stone tub where, for hundreds of years, humans like me got naked and submersed. They let the death particulates go. I started bathing like this again because I’ve been very sick with no known cause. The baths, when salted, ease me.
Wound
I like the expression “to rub salt in one’s wound.”
Do You
When I went to college and I told the woman where I was from, she assumed I knew how to make my own salts. I laughed because I didn’t have a clue.
Why do we assume knowledge in proximity? Intimacy?
I suppose I am asking: why such elaborate stunts, in mimicry? We go to great lengths to replicate the sea, for its healing capacities, but sanitized. Why can’t we just admit that there are things we don’t understand?
Epsom
Epsom salts are magnesium sulfate, and, I’ve learned, completely different from table salts.
Thalassotherapy
Recently, I learned about thalassotherapy, wherein one is wrapped in seaweed, or, alternatively, bathed in water in which seaweed has been boiled. I suppose it could mean more than this. Thalassotherapy, from the Greek, translates to a kind of sea-therapy. Of the sea. I go down east to visit a friend. That weekend my head is pounding from injury and exhaustion. There, we drive around these properties where she is now working. There are hoop houses and greenhouses. Macro algae drying and plants, very green plants, sprouting in thick black soil with scraps of bones peeking out, yet to degrade. We walk out to the armpit of a cove, Long Cove, and the tide is going. We lay down with my love and the dog on the hot gray rocks and she photographs us. Salt stains on our pants from last week’s work. Salt stains against the shoreline. Beds of rockweed, brittle, browned, crunching as we roll back up to our feet. Before we leave to drive home, she gives me a cloth bag for putting in the bath. There are dried seaweeds—rockweed—and herbs. Flower petals that look like they came from roses, but what variety, or how they were dried, is unclear. I am told by the farmer—who is pregnant and, on her pants, there are purple and blue galaxies and she is planting strawberries—to boil the satchel in a pot, not bathwater. For potency.
I want to do more for potency.
Salt, as an additive, relates constantly to potency. Like of flavor. Aliveness. Water quality. Sorrow. How to measure this. How to ask this.
Pasta Water
There is an old Italian adage—but maybe it’s not old, or not Italian—to turn your pasta water to seawater. I have always loved this expression. I have always taken it seriously.
Diseased, my healers have warned me about too much salt. I say, “My feet are swollen,” or “My heart hurts,” lying with my feet up against the wall, on the phone, or texting when I can’t make the words come out.
Last time I was in the emergency room, they tried to send me home while I was still unraveling. They drew my blood between convulsions, so the spot they punctured grew very blue. I was alarmed, then sobbing, and embarrassed that I couldn’t hold still. The nurse suspected withdrawal or something psychiatric, as my record showed that I was currently unmedicated. The doctor prescribed magnesium. I was evaluated for the psych ward. They undressed me. I read golf magazines while I waited. When the doctor came in, I was sitting in his chair. So he sat impatiently on the patient’s bed and made eye contact. They sent me home from that, too. I was calmer. It hurt less. I went home with my family and my tears and my magnesium, two bottles because, at Walgreens, the element was on sale.
Tears
Since I’ve been sick, I’ve started crying profusely again.
In yoga class, I practice “riding the wave of my breath.” My breath’s wave is a breaker.
When Hurt, as a Child
As a child, saltwater was the cure for everything.
At my mother’s, past nine o’clock. So, not that late, and she is going through photographs without order. They had order at some point, to someone. Mostly the order is the rolls of film: when they began and when they ran out. When I was a child, I was photographed onto a substance (film) and not into pixels. Once, even, I had my picture painted.
She is going through photographs and I have just had a cocktail called a Seawater Martini because it is Seaweed Week in the city I am from, a week where lots of restaurants sell more seaweed than they usually do, and everyone partakes in the hype. There is even a symposium, which is the national symposium, and tomorrow I will go there for my job. No one here is very interested in the cosmic shape of salt or discussing the analogy of salt on a slug. No one here is very interested in discussing the defamiliarization, the total order anarchy, of protists. Though, at least some, are saltwater experts in ways that make my mind expand. And how do I know what they’re interested in? I wonder if there will be Seawater Martinis.
My mother is going through photographs, and there is one where I’m standing in the water at a phase of childhood I do not remember. I look strong in my wet bathing suit. Charm around my neck. I look buff, holding on with one hand to a ring float, shaped like a dragon or another mythical creature. Curls around the face, and I am looking dead at the camera.
I am writing about this because I am standing in salt water. I know because I know.
Self-Care
After Christmas, when the drugstore was having its sales, I scanned the cosmetics aisle’s unkempt racks for the kinds of things whose packaging convinced me. I was also looking for bath salts. There were three scents, each in rather plain packaging. Artificial scents make me nauseous, but they were drugstore bath salts, so at that point the difference was minimal. Vanilla, eucalyptus, pear.
SeaBreeze TM
In high school, I thought my hair looked best after I’d been swimming in the ocean, so I started investing in the sea spray products at the drugstore. How can you bottle sea spray? Can you bottle the post-ocean? Turns out you can: you can make a bottle that claims these things. You can even sell the bottle.
Meats
Someone gives us a treat for my dog which looks like it was pulled from a cadaver. It is orange and sinewy. It bears its tendons. She gnaws on the treat for an hour. After, it is so salty that she starts to pant, pausing only to lap more water. She pants for the next two days. There is little worse than that kind of overabundance. Or, I guess, overindulgence.
We salt meats for preservation and flavor. Stop the rot.
At the Pub, a Guy
At the pub, a guy, who is my dear friend, recalls the summer when he swam every day. I don’t remember if it overlapped with the summer he farmed oysters, like I do now. Regardless, I was surprised because he’s not the type to swim in a river each day, to perform that kind of ritual. Except apparently, he is. The thing that stood out to me the most was temperature. He kept repeating: no matter the weather, the water was consistent. He could depend on its temperature.
Temperature, temper, temperamental.
I like faucets where hot and cold are separated so that they can be manipulated at the same time. The layering is more realistic.
Dips
This year in particular, saltwater dip collectives are popular. Gender-specific or not. One group calls themselves something about hard nipples, but I can’t remember. That is the disease. The dis-ease. The not remembering.
I haven’t joined a collective. I followed a few on my socials for a while, then gave up. They seemed happy as they were, and not in need of new members. Instead, I fantasize about daily morning or afternoon dips. I learn about Wim Hof and free divers, too. Behind the apartment, in the cove, the conditions are accommodating. I fantasize all winter, until it is spring. I do not do my dips.
After work when my bones are tired or uneasy, I draw baths indoors, and pretend I am in that cove, where, underwater, all the colors shift.
The Disease, the Dis-Ease
What even is there to say about it. Over two years ago (that’s a full lifetime for some animals), I got sick. As in, I fell into sickness. As in, the veils loosened. It overcame me. Felt like parasites or possession. Feels like parasites or possession. The trouble was, it was undetectable to a biomedical world. It is, mostly, undetectable. I have learned new ways to articulate pain.
Networking
Salt baths, saunas, and other kinds of spas are touted as the new hip place to network. I see tasteful photographs of lithe businesswomen’s naked bodies, nakedness obscured by bubbles or light linens, or cedar walls.
I like to think of going in so gritty and mud-drenched they would think my nails were painted gray. And just let the sediment flow off me. Discussing investments, events, gossip, etc.
Salt Lick
It is more common to see moose driving north. Deer are abundant. Moose, along roadsides, still scarce. When we drive to the lake, we pass a clearing (from logging) where there are salt licks laid out for the animals. Here, I have seen more moose than I can count on my hands. But for the past two years, I have seen none. I think about how good, how intoxicating, that salt must be to them.
Fish
Because you cannot tell from looking (only tasting, smelling, or measuring), it is easy to see saltwater without realizing it. It is also easy to take for granted its life-giving abilities. What happens to a saltwater fish in freshwater? For the most part, it dies.
I wrote an essay about sardines or tinned fish and also bathing. I was preoccupied by the idea of the bather as sardine, the bather as fish. Habitats, reversed environments, the submarine, etc.
Lamps
We keep two salt lamps on the mantle in the apartment I live in. Both plug into the wall. They are pink and Himalayan. Because they have served for many years, both are in states of dissolution. Sharp crystals form around their bases and on the photographs we left too close to them. That puckering. One looks molten, but to the touch it is still like stone. We used to flick those salt lamps on daily. Be in their glow. Now, they refuse brilliance. They simply won’t give light.
Local
When the woman in college assumed I knew how to make—derive? capture? draw out?—sea salt, I got jealous. I got defensive. I have lived by the ocean on islands more or less populated for the entirety of my short life. Only a few years take exception. So she went to Hawaii where the salinity is so high and tried to do this. She seemed successful. She sent a photograph of a Ziplock bag that looked nefarious. It contained her sea salt.
There are people on my coast who do this, name it, package it, and sell it. I’d like to talk to them about the separation. The drawing out of one substance from another. This particular kind of splitting.
Sea salt
For Christmas, my parents offer me a box of striped socks made out of bamboo fibers. On each sole: SEASALT.
Margarita
I order a Margarita for the salts. By the end of the evening, I am almost buoyant.
Great Salt Lake
I have always wanted to go to the Dead Sea, I said on the phone with S. She was standing on the edge of the Great Salt Lake, where it was very windy. She didn’t hear me.
Great Salt Lake, Utah, February. I was stunned at how expansive the flats were, that sense of draining or being drained. So familiar, from the tides back home in the north Atlantic. But here I could almost hear the loss. It was dusk, snowing, and the factories were very bright. S. said there were people performing on Antelope Island. We stared out at the island, which looked like the ones she and I cut past in the Mediterranean last summer, except all the colors were inverted.
Doctor
I find a new healer who is friends with my mother. We first meet at her home where the wood stove is cranking. There’s a salt breeze, I smell it, though we are not so close to the ocean, the Gulf of Maine. She draws me a bath.
Grains
Why do we say “grains of salt”? Like we say grains of sand or grains of rice. Rice, at least, is a grain.
I feel misled by all this verbiage. Let the language dissolve, salt to the pasta water. To turn it to seawater. That’s for good cooking. That’s for health.
Here I write salt in grains, crystals, each sentence structured but precarious. Let the language dissolve. Turn to seawater.
Work
Now I work out on the water, but it is brackish, so when it hits your lips, it is not so alarming. We grow oysters, which are later consumed while still living. They are described as “briny” or “sweet” or “grassy” or “salty” or, in our case, “buttery.” I like to think about the fact that someone is contemplating brine somewhere, letting the creature slip down their throat, at a bar while I stand, feet wet, on this barge, letting the creature slip into my consciousness. As water people, we are also described as “salty.” To be salty is to be tough by particular measures. It is, quite literally, to be of the sea.
Mine
Stop the mines. “What is mine is never ours.”
Price Of
Something on Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt. Sell/sel, as in the French for salt. These simultaneities! Exhaust me.
Solutions
Sometimes, the solution is as simple as buoyancy.
Sometimes, it is as simple as saline. For the eyes (vision), for the throat (communication, authenticity), for the nervous system, etc.
Chemistry
I hope a chemist reads this and gets red in the face because of everything I have left out. Everything I do not know. Like just how many chemical salts exist. Like what a salt really is. I hope someone is passionate enough to react viscerally. Then maybe, to calm themselves, they will boil seaweeds, draw a bath, and soak.
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