Poetry Matters: Writing From Underwater

monthly essay | how writing slows down time.

Welcome back to ‘Poetry Matters’ a monthly essay series where I write about writing and the creative process. I want to use this series to blur the boundaries between essay and poem. Today’s essay is about writing and time. Let’s begin.

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There’s something about being underwater that makes time slow down. 

The way everything dissolves into a mosaic of blue and green. Ghost-like shapes take the place of defined lines and dance with amorphous shadows. Down here, the only real thing is light hitting water. Water hitting skin. These tender collisions. The voices that arrive are muffled, as though they belong to a dream or old memory. Now the body sinks into weightlessness, suspended in this place without edges, without horizon. And just like that, the blunt rays of light liquify. Time slurs and trips, intoxicated. The space between each second expands like a wide breath. How else can this be described other than a feeling of existing in another way? The feeling that another world is almost possible, rising like a cold moon, just within reach. 

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I think what I love the most about writing is how it makes time strange. How it condenses days, years, decades into a single sentence. With the right words, even a lifetime can fit into the breadth of one’s palm. With the flick of a page, a single moment stretches over breathless paragraphs. To be a writer is to learn that time is a malleable substance. I suppose that writing was my first ever taste of power; realising that I could smudge the world with my thumb and then bring it back into focus. That I could flip the familiar upside down and visit the shadow world that exists beneath our own where all the eerie, beautiful things live. When I first started to write, it felt like a type of alchemy - making one thing out of another. All I had was my mind and what lay in front of me. But in between the two, I found a white noise. A dark water. A place that smelled like earth, blood, and metal. A lake with the face of a starless sky. A place that felt like going underwater. A place where anything could happen. 

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These days, I swim through the green pools of my mind where time cartwheels and the familiar stand on its head. I’m trying to remember what it felt like to spend entire days down here. I used to live here once, before I had to live among real people. Down here, the words come and go, come and go. The water is everything all at once. Clear as day. Murky with blood. Lake water and brine. I dive deeper, tracing my fingers against all that is sunken - the debris of the past and shipwrecks of futures that cannot be. Down here, everyday is Sunday. It is always the hour just before sunset. I stay here for ages - giving names to shadows, finding the castaway lives we sent underwater. Like rocks, I dig out words from the lake bed and discover the dust of other words sealed beneath them. The unbearable, the surreal, the haunted all swim past me in shoals of fish. Their silvery scales glint in the light, catching fragments of rainbow. Looking up through this greywater, all I can see is a scattered sun and the vague contours of elsewhere. Elsewhere, yes. Soon it will be time to put the world back together. Soon. One by one, I gather my words from the bleached pebbles. Then I turn to the broken sun and go back up for air. 

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If you read till here, thank you!

And a question for all of you write: does writing change your relationship with time? And if yes, how does it feel? Let me know in the comments!

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Finally, here’s what I’ve been loving on Substack this week:

The Salt of the Earth

I’ll be back with new writing next week. Until then, take care.

Love,

Anagha