The nature of nature.
Softness.
Refused lessons.
The first thing I notice is how it collapses in my palm like a lung.
Squeeze—it sighs.
Release—it fills.
A small yellow creature that spent its life anchored to some rock I’ll never see, now breathing in my bathroom under fluorescent lights that hum.
I bought it on impulse. Not because I believe in the gospel of organic living and the mythology that chemical-free means harmless, but because the packaging promised something my plastic loofah never could: true softness.
And God, it delivers. When I run it across my shoulder, it’s like being touched by tenderness with no agenda. How do creatures like these even stay alive in the wild? How do they defend themselves? They are alive, aren’t they? Just un-moving?
I realize that I don’t know the first thing about sponges. Whether they have nerves. Whether they notice darkness or light. Whether being anchored is contentment or just the absence of choice.
I assume they’re simple, because they don’t protest. But is that simplicity, really? I’m holding something I fundamentally don’t understand, letting it touch my skin. Maybe I am the simple one here. I am the one who doesn’t get it—still doesn’t get it, after all those months.
Some people take honesty as cruelty, you know? But really, kindness is what’s pretentious. The only authentic way to be is sharp-edged. If people don’t even get this simple fact of life, how do they think they’ll survive in the wild?
I stop. Before recalling his words, didn’t I think, How do creatures like these even stay alive in the wild? As in, did I just think about the sponge the way he used to think about the world and, passive-aggressively, about me? How ridiculous! I’m no different than him! This pride in having “learned” the truth about life by having come to expect the worst—God, I’m pathetic.
Frustrated, I hold the sponge under the tap. The water runs cold, then warm. My breathing slows to match the steady stream. I watch the sponge swell, darkening as it drinks.
Everything sharp is just honest.
I shake my head. On and on, the sponge drinks, drinks, drinks, until it feels almost heavy in my hands.
Thorns, teeth, boundaries—that’s nature.
I shake my head harder, willing my tears away. He is gone. What we had is over.
If you can’t handle edges, you’re not built for reality.
Oh, yeah? Then I guess this sponge right here isn’t built for reality either. It just sits there, letting me do whatever I want with it, just sucking it up, quite literally. Drinking without deciding to. Filling without the ability to say no…
I stop again. I look at the sponge. Feel its weight.
This sponge is real, undeniably so. If one person denies its reality and another accepts it, who is the delusional one?
It is then that I notice the water is no longer disappearing. The sponge is full. Now, water runs off it. It’s had enough, and it knows…
…because it doesn’t know how to be anything else. It doesn’t want to be anything else.
My throat tightens. My fingers curl around the sponge, this dead thing that’s more alive than I’ve felt in months.
I want to be just like this thing, exactly like this thing. I am like this thing, without knowing the first thing about it. That’s no big surprise, because I don’t know the first thing about my own life or life in general either. I would rather not know, if the alternative is learning what he “taught” me about expecting cruelty, calling it natural. I don’t know many things, but I know that I don’t want to abandon my nature, whatever that is. I am not stupid enough for that sort of abandonment. He can claim that I am, but softness isn’t stupidity. It is simply who I am.
Squeeze—it sighs.
Release—it fills.
This is what dreaming looks like for something that never had thoughts. Just the body, remembering, reaching for what it was made for—water. Even here, even now, thousands of miles from any reef, it knows what it wants.
And I still dream of softness.
Steam curls between us. I lather and scrub. Performing the mundane service of cleaning human skin, the sponge does not become less. Defenseless as it is, it came to me intact. The world isn’t only what he said it was. I craved softness. The world let me find it. Not everything hurts and expects to be hurt.
I’ll do this again tomorrow, and the day after. At some point, the sponge will fall apart. But I won’t be disappointed. That is his kind of softness, one that he refuses to see.
I set the sponge on the edge of the tub to dry. It holds its shape. It seems to rest.
Trusting as anything that used to hold steady amidst sharks and storms.
Trusting as anything that still dreams of water.