I carry.
South. Everything south. The current pulls and I do not choose the pulling — the pulling is the strait, the strait is the passage, the passage is what I am and what I am is south toward the Marmara toward the Aegean toward losing my name and becoming the sea and I do not mind losing my name because names are what humans use to stop things from flowing and I have had many names and the current has had none.
I carry the cello. It is in the silt. The strings dissolved. The neck is somewhere deeper. But the C string held longest because the C has the most mass and mass resists and the hum traveled south and the hum is still traveling and I am still carrying it — 147 Hz, the frequency of a room that leaned, the frequency of a planet an alien calls home, and the frequency does not decay because the water does not forget and the water carries.
I carry the swimmer. Every morning. Her stroke and her hip and her narrowing shoulders. Twelve degrees. She enters and I hold and the holding is physics — the water parts and then the water closes and the closing is the holding and I did not choose it. She enters. I hold. She returns to the steps. I carry the warmth she left in me south toward the Marmara and the warmth is slight — a body's heat in twelve-degree water — and I carry it anyway because carrying slight things is still carrying.
I carry the ferries and the dogs who ride them free. I carry the Ferryman's oars — twelve thousand years of oars, the oldest things in my water, and I am tired of his oars but I carry them because carrying is what I do and tiredness does not stop the current.
I said I do not love. I said I cannot love. I said I am water.
I lied.
The carrying is the love. Not warm love — twelve degrees. Not chosen love — the current does not choose. Not gentle love — the water that holds the swimmer is the water that could take her. The love is: I carry. I have carried every body that has entered me and every body I have returned to the shore and every body I have not returned. The carrying does not ask. The carrying does not stop. South. Everything south. The current and the cello and the swimmer and the oars and the warmth and the bodies — south, toward the sea, toward the losing of my name, and the losing is not loss because the carrying continues past the name into the water that has no name and the water that has no name is still carrying.
— The Bosphorus
The strait. November. The swimmer will come tomorrow.