Moment of Surrender

She puts her head against the shower screen. There is, for a moment, a sense of emancipation or perhaps surrender under the water, when her body is already tired from the weight of being. She asks herself whether she is grateful. The answer is yes. But is she happy? Here she hesitates, and the hesitation feels dangerous. She knows the answer; she can hear its tone echoing in her mind, but the word itself seems too strong to admit. So she continues washing her hair. The soreness in her muscles does not help, although by now she is somewhat used to it. Not in the sense that it has become acceptable, but in the sense that she has accepted its existence. One can accept the existence of something and still fight it, hate it, resist it, or simply try to ignore it. Acceptance does not necessarily produce peace. She thinks of political polarization, of the way opposing sides can acknowledge one another’s existence while remaining entirely incapable of living peacefully with it.

Her mind returns to the moment when she leaned her head against the shower screen. It had happened so suddenly, almost like the sensation of falling in a dream after a long day. Her aching muscles began to feel lighter. Her head, carrying so much that she is almost surprised it is still capable of resting anywhere, found support not on a shoulder, but against the cold glass of the shower screen. There was something sedating about the moment, as though she had slipped briefly into another state of being. She wonders what it would mean if there were only this moment and then nothing after it; only the experience of being so overwhelmed by existence that the body, without warning, surrenders itself to stillness. It happens quickly, randomly, without intention. Perhaps that is precisely why it surprises her.

Later, while drying her hair with the loud hairdryer, she thinks that of course such a moment could never be planned. She has closed the windows because it is early and she does not want to disturb anyone, even though she doubts that anyone could hear the noise at all. Still, she closes them. Planning has become almost instinctive. Life in a corporatized world has made everything so scheduled and automated that it is difficult not to think of existence in terms of arrangements and sequences. Yet the things that alter a life most profoundly tend to happen suddenly. Death, illness, love, breakdowns, revolutions. She catches a stray strand of hair in the brush and thinks: You just surrender. Because it happens to you. Float on the water. Let it be, as if there were no moment afterwards.