Tell the water I'm coming
Tell the water I'm done with all my running
Tell the water I'm ready
Wash me clean, wash me clean again
Tell the water I'm coming
Tell the water I'm done with all my running
Tell the water I'm ready
Wash me clean, wash me clean again
When we were just little girls
My older sister almost drowned in my uncle's swimming pool
We hadn't yet learned to fear water
How it can reach it's claws around
Your neck and turn your body against you
My father signed us up for swimming lessons
To teach us to move into the thick of fear and find our way through it
On the first day,
The instructor picked me up and
Threw me into the deep end without warning
With nothing but a rubber tube around my waist I
Found a depth to my voice that i hadn't known existed
A red scream that stretched itself across the length of the pool
Reaching for no one
And Every time I called out, gasping, coughing up water
Heart hammering against my frail chest
He pushed me back again and again for an hour straight
By the end of the summer I had learned to swim
My father never heard about the cruel instructor
And I emerged
A new girl who knew how her body
Could be both the anchor and life jacket
Loving you was a kind of drowning
A panicked gasping
I was always reaching for something I could never hold
Everything I tried to write was stifled breath
A mouth filled with water
Leaving you
Was the kind of chaos that comes with teaching your body a new trick
Repeating it aggressively again and again
Until either by fatigue or fate
You surrender
You gather just enough momentum and you move
Tell the water I'm coming
Tell the water I'm done with all my running
Tell the water I'm ready
Wash me clean, wash me clean again
Tell the water I'm coming
Tell the water I'm done with all my running
Tell the water I'm ready
Wash me clean, wash me clean again