High Water
I wrote this poem about the feeling of being happy about where I am now while missing aspects of something I once had—despite absolutely not wanting those things back.
It’s worth noting that though this poem was inspired by a conversation with a dear friend about some of her actual life experiences, the details within this poem are not true to her specific experience. Rather, they were made up for the sake of communicating the feeling I wanted the poem to convey.
High Water
It finds me most often
when I’m stretched between
cotton, when I remember
these sheets once adorned
the bed that I left
in the town where the river
bends all the way
to the bay and never
flows back to those banks
again. I don’t mean to reminisce
on a life I haven’t lived,
or rather, on a version
which ceased being possible
when I passed through the estuary,
became salty, lost
the fresh. The salt
brought out flavors
of a life I’d always
wanted—it’s sweet
while still briny;
there’s depth—and yet
I remember the honeycomb
tile behind the bar
where we met. I remember
how we felt
like year 1 maths—
a new language, yet simple
once I got it. I’ll never
forget sitting under the figs
as you penned a to-do list
which later made its home
on our fridge.
Between these sheets, I don’t long
for something that could have
been, when it would only ever be
a dam;
I’d be stagnant. I mourn
the future that toppled
in front of all the King’s horses
and their men when I realized:
it was never more
than a nursery rhyme. Reciting
it made no difference.
I’m a clam and where I now live
is high water—I’m happy.
But god I do miss
the end
of those cityscape sunsets
when lights became stars
floating atop our freshwater skin.
First Draft — 16jul2026
What do you do when the life you could have lived
Stops existing once you dont choose it?
–
This peach is sweet, but could it be
sweeter had I chosen the one
I’ve since left?
Life is or isn’t based on a mere choice
and what is becomes more present,
what isn’t, less.
I knew when I made the decision,
There was no other
Option. It was this, or my felt death.
Still part of me longs for the peach
That wasn’t eaten, for what could
Have been.
Writing Notes
First things first: Yes, I was thinking about the peach scene in season three of The Summer I Turned Pretty when I wrote that first draft.
This poem is the first time where I wasn’t writing explicitly about my own life. And yet, I found that though none of the practical details (e.g. the honeycomb tiles in a bar) are “true” to my own lived experience, the feelings throughout this poem absolutely are.
How many times have I laid in bed, reminiscing on something or someone from my past? How many times have I reminisced on something that I don’t actually want, but that part of my brain still thinks sounds nice—largely because it was known and therefore ‘comfortable’? How many times have I wished something about my life could be simpler—and sweeter—than it is now—even though I love the depths I get to explore and experience? How many times have I mourned the reality that something wasn’t all that I had made it out—usually to myself—to be?
The answer to all of those questions is more times than I can count.
I jotted that first draft down literally while catching up with my friend who inspired this poem, mostly because I wanted to capture the emotion we were talking about as clearly as possible so I could return to it in a dedicated writing session later. The first draft is a “study” of sorts, similar to how painters would do a quick sketch to capture a moment, which they’d then base a full painting on later.
When I did return to the first draft a couple days later, this poem as it now sits just flowed right out of me. (Of course, with some minor edits for stylistic choices.) Probably because, for one, I genuinely love Brisbane (Queensland, Australia)—the “town where the river / bends all the way / to the bay and never / flows back to those banks / again.”—so revisiting it mentally for the sake of these images was a joy. But also because these emotions—these felt experiences—are so familiar, and thus, in a way, comforting to me. I didn’t need to have the literal exact experience I was writing about in order to know it intimately.
(In many ways, the fact that I didn’t need to rely on 100% literal life experiences I’ve had made the exercise of finding imagery for this poem all the more fun. I had so much freedom and creative license, which made writing and editing both more and less difficult.)
Which is a big part of why I love poetry: it’s a mechanism for taking a personal experience and connecting it to the universal. Or at least to an experience of life that’s greater—in size, not importance—than your individual one. It doesn’t matter that each of us might know these feelings for different reasons, it matters that each of us know them. Thus this poem can briefly bring us to the exact same feeling-space, where we can commune and remind one another that, as the saying goes, “we’re all just walking each other home.”
Some things I particularly like in this poem:
The journey from freshwater to saltwater — This wasn’t a conscious thought while writing, but upon re-reading I realized: most rivers flow to the ocean. That is their natural evolution: to go from freshwater to saltwater. Personal growth seems to work the same way: you start out “fresh” (as in, green, new, bright eyed and bushy tailed, etc.) and, the more life experiences you collect, you become more of the self you were always destined (perhaps too strong of a word) to be. You become “salty” with a more defined and rounded flavor. Neither freshwater or saltwater in this metaphor are bad, they both just are exactly what they’re supposed to be in the moment they are that thing. And that natural evolution from freshwater to saltwater also isn’t “good” or “bad”—again, it’s just a thing that is the way it is meant to be. All very much like personal growth.
Moving immediately from ‘becoming salty’ to the memory of “honeycomb tile” — which I used here as a way to convey that ‘yes, the past was sweet and simple, but I want more than that.’
Moving from “honeycomb” to “figs,” and, specifically to the type of figs available at the Brisbane Botanical Gardens, which I believe are technically edible but mostly ornamental. — Honeycomb has a real sweetness to it, while more ornamental figs are not very palatable. I used these images to show a progression of the relationship: it started out sweet, simple, “like year 1 maths,” but by the time the characters in the poem were living together—”on our fridge” with the notable word there being “our”—their relationship was represented by to-do lists and something bland. This isn’t inherently a bad thing—real life and thus relationships include a lot of bland shit—but it’s interesting that that is the memory the speaker of the poem has of their relationship once it was more established.
On that note, this whole poem is an exploration of memory — As just one example, the triptych of memories presented at the end of the first stanza are an interesting amalgamation of some of the types of things we remember: a specific detail of a setting where an important event (the characters first meeting) happened, a feeling (which is necessarily less grounded in a physical fact), a relatively inconsequential action taken by someone else (writing the to-do list). I’ve always been struck by how seemingly random memory is—how our brains select different aspects to hold onto in some moments than others—and I wanted to bring that reality of memory in in order to add texture to the overall story. (I could go really deep on exploring why the speaker remembered those specific things and what that tells us about them, but I’ll save that for another moment.)
The Humpty Dumpty reference — I’m not even joking, those lines came out of my brain and onto my doc basically exactly as they are in the final draft. Why was I thinking about Humpty Dumpty while writing this? I’m not sure…I’ll have to think further about what sort of brain association was happening for me. (If you have theories on the connection, I’d love to hear them.)
The reworking of the phrase, ‘happy as a clam’ — But also the implication of “high water.” High waters—or, high tide—in an ocean can be dangerous for humans; that’s why the full saying is ‘happy as a clam in high water,’ because it means the clams are safe from being harvested by humans. There’s some interesting associations here, too, with the speaker of the poem being positioned as a clam. It makes me ask: what are they now, in their new life, protected from—which they previously inherently weren’t when the water was ‘low’?
“the end / of those cityscape sunsets / when lights became stars / floating atop my freshwater skin.” — I have a very specific personal memory of watching this phenomenon happen one evening in Brisbane. Nothing ‘important’ even occurred at that moment—again, why do we remember the things we do?—but something about watching the day turn to evening and then night on the Brisbane River which flows through the CBD (or, as we’d say in the U.S., downtown) has always stuck with me. It’s nice to get to memorialize those meaningful memories into poems.
Also, this poem is set in Australia, so it only felt right to say “year 1 maths” instead of the U.S. version: “first grade.”
