How I Learned to Float
for the girls who were told to sink quietly
I. Before the Water
I was born in a city where the air pressed against your skin
like a mother checking your temperature—
warm, watchful, waiting to warn you.
The heat came with lessons.
My grandmother’s voice was a soft thunder,
rolling low through kitchen tile and warm cookies.
She said:
“Keep your mouth closed.
Don’t flail.
Don’t want too much.”
And so I didn’t.
I learned to stand on the edges—
concrete pool lips, school hallways,
ankles slick with a hope I didn’t yet have the words for,
watching kids cannonball into sunlight
like freedom was an inheritance
and the water never bit back.
I kept my toes curled,
counting the ways a girl could disappear.
How a name could be too heavy.
How laughter could echo like a dare.
How swimming looked like magic
but might be memory—
and memory could drown you
before you took your first real breath.
II. Sinking Lessons
The first time I slipped,
it wasn’t a pool.
It was a hallway echo.
A teacher who asked the question, then didn’t call my name.
A friend’s sharp smile that sliced me out of the group text.
It was a Tuesday.
It was always a Tuesday.
The kind where silence becomes soup,
thick and hard to swallow,
and you hold your breath in the cafeteria
because someone’s joke sits too close to your skin.
I learned to sink in plain sight.
No splash.
Just stillness.
I made myself small.
Smaller than a whisper.
I became so quiet,
even my shadow forgot to follow.
They called it composure.
They called it maturity.
But really,
I was learning the choreography of disappearing.
I was dancing at the bottom of myself,
feet never touching the floor,
lungs filled with all the things I couldn’t say.
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III. The Wanting
But want is a wild thing.
It grows even in drought.
Pushes through the cracks
where the light slips in.
I wanted to laugh at things that hurt.
To eat sorbet with the sun on my face
and forget that joy could be a crime
in a body like mine.
I wanted to cry loud,
to kiss someone under fireworks,
to stand in the middle of a room
and not shrink when someone said
"too much."
I wanted to float—
not just survive the undertow
but rise above it.
Face up.
Arms out.
Ready to believe in the sky.
IV. The Floating
It didn’t come in a triumph.
No music swelled.
No one clapped.
I was alone.
Alone at the edge
with fear in my throat
and the past braided into my hair.
I stepped in anyway.
The water was cold—
not cruel,
just honest.
It told the truth in goosebumps.
It asked me:
"Are you ready to let go?"
And for once,
I didn’t fight it.
I didn’t steel myself.
Didn’t count the exits.
Didn’t rehearse the apology.
I let go.
Let the water hold me.
Let the fear turn into current,
and the current carry me—
not under,
but up.
I floated.
Not because I was fearless.
Not because I was saved.
But because I was buoyed
by every whisper sung under breath,
every freedom note passed through kitchens,
every ancestor who learned to breathe
in impossible places.
V. After the Water
Now when the world tries to drown me
in paperwork, politics, pretty smiles,
I remember that hush.
The way the water didn’t need to shout
to know its power.
I remember the art of staying above.
The miracle of rising without wings.
And I teach my sisters the same:
You don’t have to be steel to survive.
You can be water—
soft,
shifting,
impossible to hold down.
We float together now.
Not as defense.
But as declaration.
We are not afraid of depth.
We are the tide.
We are the breath.
We are the miracle.
And we—
Black girls with open mouths and open hearts—
we are still rising.
Artist Spotlight: Calida Rawles
The Water Remembers Us
When I was little, I used to think water was just something you swam in—or were warned about. But my aunt, Calida Rawles, taught me something different. With a brush in her hand and a whole universe of Blackness in her heart, she showed me that water could hold memory. Hold softness. Hold us.
Her paintings don’t just depict Black folks in water.
They reimagine us—floating, submerged, suspended in time like galaxies in motion.
In a world that teaches Black girls to sink quietly,
my aunt paints us as weightless.
Not because we are empty,
but because we are free.
Calida’s art is love-work.
It’s history, healing, and hypothesis.
It asks:
What if Blackness was the element itself?
What if liberation looked like leisure?
She paints us as myth, as mirror, as memory.
And I am proud, honored, and still learning—
from her,
from her brushes,
from her grace.
Because to see her work
is to believe that we are not drowning.
We are rising.
We are refracting.
We are water,
and we will not be held down.
In The Space in Which We Travel, Calida Rawles paints two Black girls submerged, their white dresses billowing, their hands interlocked as if they’re holding onto the only truth they have: each other. Their bodies curve into a double helix, a visual genealogy—bloodline and bond, inheritance and intention. They aren’t drowning. They’re suspended. Held.
Their connection isn’t just sisterhood; it’s survival. The water around them is not neutral. It’s deep, duplicitous—what Rawles herself calls “a very dangerous element.” But it’s also the place where transformation happens. The painting holds both truths at once: the terror of submersion and the grace of release.
Rawles says, “In order to survive in water, you have to relax. If you struggle, you sink.” That line is a metaphor for how so many Black girls have learned to move through the world. To take the waves as they come. To loosen, even as we’re being pulled under.
In this work, the water becomes a state of being: fluid, weighted, vast. There’s no easy narrative here—just two girls suspended in the tension between risk and refuge, tenderness and turbulence. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe survival isn’t always about fighting. Maybe sometimes it’s about learning to be still in the storm. Maybe sometimes, just staying above is the revolution.