THERE IS A SOUND THE WATER MAKES

Back in 2006 the piers in Williamsburg were unregulated. We were able to squeeze through gashes in the wire fencing and watch the moon glisten against abandoned factories while we sat on broken concrete slabs and thought (but never talked) about the future. The warehouses along the water on the Bedford L stop were divided into housing with plywood and rented for exorbitant prices to willingly clueless and seemingly bohemian post undergraduate students, the lifts still industrial and built for cargo and the rooms often windowless. Most times we took the steps and laid out sunbathing on the rusting fire escapes, accepting that the water pressure would never thoroughly wash the conditioner from our hair and that it was nearly impossible to make a full pitcher of ice cold jasmine green tea. When my ex-boyfriend called me after a long and painful hiatus in the middle of the scorching, air conditionless summer to inform me that the couch he was house sitting (which I had dragged over from college in Massachusetts) was allegedly infested with beg bugs, I insisted he drop off just the cushions by the water on North 3rd and Berry Street in Brooklyn so I could say one last and final goodbye. I sat there, looking into the water, knowing that this was a part of me I would never meet again. But I never once got bitten.

There is a sound the water makes when you don’t know or recognize yourself. A familiar, jagged hollowness that is the same no matter how much time has gone by, no matter where you are in the world. Soothing, but taunting. Understanding, but teasing, following you through life and constantly asking if the existence you live is enough of what you seek. And even if you know that you’ll never find solace in visiting her, she knows that you’ll always come back to the water on the city’s edge, looking for the answer that may never come, in her unforgiving but infinite reflection.