Bodies of Water

Every one of us began inside another body of water. Neimanis calls this gestationality: your first world was someone else's inner sea. We are each born of a body of water — and built from water that others, human and not, once carried.

Stacy Alaimo's word is transcorporeality — matter moving across the line we like to draw around a self. What is "environment" one minute is "you" the next: the river becomes your blood, your breath becomes the weather, the fish carry traces of us and we of them.

So there is no clean edge. We are all downstream of one another — of every creature and cloud that held this water first, and every one who'll hold it next. The membrane is real, but it leaks. Belonging isn't a bond we add on afterward; it's the water already moving through.

Attention flows too. Monotropism (Murray, Lesser & Lawson) describes minds that pour attention into a few deep channels at a time — a strong current, not a thin spread. In flow, the channel becomes the whole world.

And currents can meet. When our attention tunnels line up — same interest, same rhythm, working side by side — they join into collective flow: parallel play, shared hyperfocus, the easy company of people deep in the same thing. Autistic Realms (Helen Edgar) names it shared flow — attention turned toward one another's, holding a channel open together.

A watering hole is where flows gather — the literal one, where creatures meet to drink, and the kind Stimpunks builds into Cavendish Space: a place made for attention to pool without anyone being pushed out of their own channel. Belonging, here, is a confluence of attention.

Follow the water back far enough and it leaves the planet. Much of Earth's water is older than the Sun — formed in cold interstellar clouds and carried in on ice and comets before there was an ocean to hold it. The sea in your cells is partly starlight's leftover frost.

It has been vapour, rain, river, glacier, whale, fern, and stranger — and it will be again, long after us. You are one shape it is taking, on loan, for a little while.

So when you feel the pull toward others — toward shared water, shared attention, shared air — that isn't neediness to apologise for. It's the truest thing about you. We are all bodies of water, all made of star stuff, all borrowing the same old sea. Love you down to your star stuff.