Despite having been tossed in a pool at three months, back in those days when teaching babies to swim was all the rage, and having spent my childhood swimming, scuba had never really entered my view. In my early 20s a few friends were getting certified for a destination wedding, and I went along without thinking much about it. The class was easy, the pool work was fun, though I had a tendency to get rolled by my tank, the BCs at the time being made for men, and a vest for a small man did not fit snugly on a small woman.

In Belize, we did our training dives and I floated around below the surface in a state of bliss. My dive partner was fascinated with photography, and since one dives as buddies, and one doesn’t part ways, I spent a fair number of years toodling around while he tried to figure out the early equipment, take photos, and try to sort color correction.

Of the eight of us who went on that trip, two of us liked it enough to spend our week in Belize learning new skills. Deep diving, wreck diving, navigation, night diving. I spent my days studying rather than drinking. I discovered I disliked night diving, despite the bubbles going up when I breathed out, I would get disoriented and feel a sense of panic. It calmed over time, but was easy enough, unless there was a full moon, to make me night dive for pleasure.

On our certification for deep diving, I took the slate and did the sums, and my partner laid on his back on the ocean floor, enormous turtles watching us, and struggled with the basics. When he dropped the pencil and rolled over to find it on the floor, he burst into near-hysterical giggles when he notice I was batting it down to him. Wood floats. Narc’d he was, and not that deep. He laughed so hard his regulator popped out of his mouth, so I stuffed that back in and dragged him up, our trainer shaking her head at us. He got certified, but I always kept a leery eye on him when we got below 30 meters.

After years of avid diving, I finally coughed up the money for my own gear. A BC and dive computer, super long split fins so I could fly at depth, and warm gear, as I was always cold even after a few days of blue water diving, checking my temperature at times to be sure I’d returned to normal before heading out again. Owning my own gear made me one with the water. I could move, or not move, with perfect buoyancy, float in silence, lie on my back and feel the surge toss me about, watching the sun dapple above and the schools of fish swim by. Turtles and mantas, I found, discovered a strange floating human 20 meters down to be interesting. Sharks, once or twice, but those are other stories.

There is such a perfection to floating below. The crackling sounds, the pops, the endless noises that are part of sea life. Floating over a reef watching busy life go on, sharks being cleaned off the edge of a cliff of fast moving water, parrot fish blowing mucus sacs as sleeping bags. Startled puffers and unexpected octopuses. Diving once in Greece, not much to see just beautiful to feel, I poked my nose in an old wreck and the enormous teeth of a moray eel came at me. I almost choked on the water I inhaled, flooded my mask, and had to reset, all the while laughing so hard at my out-of-scale reaction.

In Palau we dove wrecks, hundreds of feet down, deco diving, leaving tanks on the way down so we could slowly make our way back up, stopping to avoid the bends, tick tock, longer to get up than to get down, longer to get up than spent down. One dive, we were going deep, and with our limited time to get to the wreck, we had to fly. Our guide was a very tall muscular man, he would go first, H second, so we didn’t lose him to narc’d depths, and me at the rear. Tanks dropped and suited up, we dropped in, fins nearly a third the length of my body. Off we went, angled, and far ahead I could see only the occasional glimmer of bioluminescent plankton off the edges of fins, bubbles reaching up as I passed through them, and into the dark we went, darker, and darker, faster and deeper. This speed and dark and whispers of light blossoms into bliss for me, the strength of my body, the speed with which I can move, the perfection of being perfectly weighted and in control of my abilities, racing time. We reach the ship, and it is enormous, tilted, the sounds of a metal carcass turning in the sea, the creaks of surge, and age. The screw was glorious, enormous. Military ships are hard to imagine in the same way they can be experienced when diving their wrecks.

Lion fish were in every opening, dangerous, popping in and out, warning us away. As quickly as we arrived, it was time to race back. Only 20 minutes or so to explore before we again engage all our resources, racing against time and current out of the dark, looking for the glimmer of light and tanks hung above us, noting the minutes to reach them, no back-up plans here, in and out, up an down, relying on body and skill and equipment, training and experience and our guide, and on not losing pencils in the unknown dark.

When I was six I was an albatross who did not know how to fly. I got hurt, but the people like you, they are a damaging lot, this modern world, the brutality and lack of love applied with force then more force into the spaces where lies are told. I could tell you lies but I’d rather tell you stories.

It might be hard to tell the difference, if you don’t know how to see. Most people don’t know how to see. The world is full of lies told by those people. The rest of us, the few that remember, we tell stories and it pulls at you, and you wonder if it is a memory or a dream, or you think we are crazy and don’t deserve to live in your world of want. Because we fail to want, want enough, but the reality is that what we want are the things that you wish you could understand and your failure only brings you rage. And your rage brings danger and harm.

When I was six I ate magnets. There was always an alphabet, hanging in space. I’d sit before the refrigerator and slowly eat the magnets, over time, cautiously. The first 26 were easy, each letter with its three magnets – except the I which had two – and I’d eat work my way through a first round, and they’d hang in space, built into words and phrases. The second round would cause gravity to exert more power and they’d slip lower. By the time I was eating the final magnets, the letters had to begin to disappear. I’d hide them places. In my pockets, I’d sneak them out, empty, and bury them in the hard. I’d secret them in the bottom of trash, in a rush one or two might end up in the freezer. No one seemed to question the disappearance of letters in a house full of children.

Magnets have texture, a slightly soft solidity that is ridged on the edges. They must be chewed slowly until the core is reached, then swallowed. I can still feel their texture, I know there taste, though it has been years.  Sometimes when I walk past a childrens stores I am tempted, almost compelled, to go in and purchase a set of letters for my refrigerator. But eating magnets as an adult seems strangely wrong. It is a secret in my heart, that I still want to eat magnets, that I dream of the feel of them on my tongue and the strange zinging that sings to me.

I have an anomalous effect on compasses and gps systems. They cannot locate me in space. I like to think this is due to my steady diet of magnets as a child but it is just as likely that what we don’t realize is that these devices are placing us in time. As I live outside of standard time they are confused and I am not held.

For three years I ate magnets, deliberately, slowly, and then I found the trees, stopped eating magnets, and learned the art of invisibility.

Charlie was six or so when I met her. She has an internal compass that drives everything we do. She has a sixth sense, and a seventh, and an eighth. Maybe she was five, she is very small but so very old. It’s hard to tell. She is an ancient being in a tiny body. It sounds dreadfully cliché but perhaps there is something to these clichés. I prefer to avoid them, but in this case there is nothing I can do. I’ve never asked Charlie what she is looking for as there seems no reason to intrude. I am sure I will know when she finds it. Or perhaps she isn’t looking and that is my adult sensibility applied to this creature that has dragged me across six thousand miles of ocean and island. She looks at me with her green eyes which make clear how little I know. She isn’t disappointed, just a bit sad. Her blue eyes are far more excitable. I think it is the blue eyes which will find what she wants, and her green eyes which believe its too late and whatever she is looking for no longer exists. I can’t live without either set and I am always apprehensive when we reach a new shore, until I see her eyes, and I know who I am living with. I never know for how long. She comes and goes from her two selves in a rhythm I can find no pattern in. Her green eyes tell me I should know. Her blue eyes love me anyway.

When her eyes are blue I love her most. Until her eyes are green and I wonder how I could ever have loved that blue eyed child more than I love this green eyed one.

Do you remember when there was a website that had the URL ‘isittuesday’ dot com, and it responded yes or no, depending. It didn’t seem to lie. And somehow, Tuesday was a thing. And here we are, Tuesday.

The one thing I’ve learned from my first year of my PhD is that I’d rather be writing.

After my second masters degree, I shredded all the papers in the paperwork folder that I might ever need to apply to more school. Transcripts, proof of degree, test scores, mensa paperwork (that was sibling rivalry), and all the rest. I kept the folder and on a scrap of paper, in my jagged handwriting, I wrote: Don’t do it.

Yet, here I am. Given that I go to school every decade, it is hard to know objectively if it is better or worse than the previous time. Last time I did an MBA at Columbia, was married to an abusive fuck, and had cancer. Oh and my blood family melted down in ways I still cannot fathom. But really, all that is another story. I mean only to say, it is hard to tell if it was school that sucked.

So it is Tuesday, and twice a month on Tuesday, I show up for school, in that there are meetings and seminars and other people. And my general plan is to get out the other side of the day. Last week while in Ballinskelligs I read books on trauma and stress, they were besides each other at the airport and it seemed a good idea at the time (hash tag don’t do it could have a bigger role in my life), but what I realized is that I pour a lot of stress in my body on a daily basis by choosing to not choose.

I was up around five am most days, watched the sun rise across a hill and along the ocean and the backyard of this cottage on the edge of the world light up bit by bit, and one bunny (of interchangeable sizes, there really must have been three) would hop by for a snack, and I would be calm. The storm would rage, and I would be calm. The sea would toss itself out of the cove and up over a cliff and slam salt into the windows with a click clack and zero visibility, and I would be calm.

One afternoon following a need to stuff myself back into my body I cracked the sauna to 100F and melted my head, then put my bathing suit on and walked into the yard in the rain and laid on the very cold ground next to the bloodstone and sang songs of green and red and orange and blue. The bunnies did not return for two days after that, and I missed them, but it was weekend, and perhaps they tread further afield on those days.

F put her hands on my chest and told me to lean in, and scream as loud as I could. It was raining and sunny and we stood on a hill at the end of the yard. I leaned in, and up, and opened my mouth to scream, and nothing came out. Nothing again. Nothing again, a squeak, a few tears. We swapped sides, so I could see, or was it feel, what it would be to scream. She opened her mouth, leaned into my arms, and poured out some sound and I panicked and my arms lost all strength and she almost toppled on top of me as I burst into tears and who the hell knows what was torn down and voided and bled out in the stream. I asked her to do it again, to yell in my face, to see if I could hold strength. She was leery, and rightfully so. We did not leave until I could do it. Hold hard. I screamed too. I’ve never screamed in my life, before this. No, really, barely raised my voice, and never so close to another human.

Walking home from Tuesday school, de-souled, de-natured, in a city I do not care for, rain dripping and dreaming of writing my heart, not stilted academic posturing, I wanted so much to scream, to scream like I did at the edge of the island, to let out all the things I don’t want to name, to stomp in a puddle, be barefoot in the earth, to be as free and loud and present as I want. On a Tuesday. In any form, tearing off clothes, feeling alive and present and anything.

I turned the corner, not screaming, squeaking, quietly, squelching and suffering, and to my life, dead animals in tanks, Damien Hirst’s hellscapes of disrespect. Who does such a thing to creatures? Tromp tromp through the rain, on the cobbles, into the council block and up and up to my silencing of myself and blinking cranes and a dream of ways of being, of freedoms, of words and worlds and languages and days not Tuesday. Days of Tuesday. Days of days, who cares what day, all days are magic days, all days have earth and toes and rabbits and singing at any level and screaming and joy and rocks and blood and life. This place takes the life from Tuesdays and I have no choice but to sing it back in, as best i can, crooked lungs and dented spaces. I can sing you a Tuesday that will explode in your eyes and leave gunpowder in your mouth and you will wonder why you’ve not eaten this before, not quite like this. Eat, I beg you, it’s Tuesday, you are running out of time.