The Water I Wear: Kyoto Summer Skin

Morning has a weight before it has a colour.

I open the glass sliding door and Kyoto summer climbs onto my skin. I drink a glass of ice-cold water and it dresses my hands. The rim leaves a circle on the table and I press my palm into it. I already wear my summer mask.

On the street I carry the small sentences I can hold: ohayō, sumimasen, arigatō gozaimasu. Sometimes the grammar fogs and I bow a little too long. My cheeks bloom a little hotter.

I am a musician. My instrument is breath. Before errands I hum a soft melody; barely there, the notes lining up like droplets along a rail. I’m saving my voice for later, but later begins early in this humidity. Each inhale is already a rehearsal.

At the post office I offer the wrong word and a smile arrives to meet it. We both laugh without sound. I sign, stamp, nod. Polite choreography dances between us like a light rain. Etiquette is a membrane that keeps everyone from colliding. I move inside it, damp and grateful.

By noon, the river has gathered the city. Dragonflies draw straight lines. A bicycle bell sounds like silver fish jumping. I sit on the warm stone and unspool my hair. Two strands find my cheek and stay there: dark notes written on wet paper. I don’t know the kanji they make. I know the feeling.

I step in up to my ankles. The Kamogawa reads my body back to me: temperature, balance, pulse. Children shriek in a dialect of joy I understand completely. Above on the street, cars make long vowels. I answer with one of my own.

Back home I rinse my face and the city returns to the sink in a constellation of small glints. The bottle of Pocari Sweat I hold sweats with me. Cicadas take up the afternoon and talk about persistence. They know about masks. They wore the earth all their lives and then climbed out of it singing.

Afternoon is full of the small failures I’m learning to love. I order the right thing and receive the cousin of it. I forget a phrase and borrow a gesture. A café owner’s laugh lifts the heat. 

We stand under the same air conditioning. She says something about the weather and I agree like a river agrees with the shore. 

In Kyoto’s summer I wear a water mask: a thin layer that filters the day, before evening falls, and I step into my selkie skin*. 

Dusk arrives with blue instructions. I pack the small things: cables, set list, patience. I braid my hair with water and line my eyes in liquid blue. The mirror mists. I practise again: one vowel, then another, until the air within my ribs becomes a corridor that I can walk without touching the walls. 

I leave the apartment already glistening. The stone steps remember last night’s rain and give a little back. Cycling along the river, I pass couples tracing evening grammar: a pause, a lean, a laugh. I am silent. 

At the live house tonight, when the first note arrives, I feel my selkie skin close around me - not disguise, but permission. The mask is water and it is mine. My hands speak before my tongue does. The room answers. I am fluent now: in reverb, in wrist, in the distance between inhale and release. Heat writes fast on my forehead; a thin river runs down my spine. 

In the piano’s lacquer, the sparkles oforehead flicker back; for a moment the instrument plays me.

The set moves like weather. I carry a high note carefully across the room, a small bowl of brightness that does not spill. In the back, someone closes their eyes and nods in time. I recognise that nod; it is my daytime language returning with a different accent. We are conversant now.

When it ends, I’m soaked in a way that feels like truth. We bow together - the guitar, the audience, the heat. Someone says arigatō with a kind seriousness that feels like a hand pressed to still water. I say it back and mean it all the way through.

Outside, the blue has deepened into a colour that doesn’t need a name. I walk my bike along the Kamogawa with the mask still on, because it isn’t something I remove. The water-skin thins to a sheen and then to breath. My hair cools against my neck. The city loosens, thread by thread. Somewhere a festival drum tests one beat. I answer with my heel on the path.

Home is a window open to the night. I listen to the air conditioning translate the day.

Before sleep I warm down the voice: the notes step back into their river. I am not less Selkie now; I am more shore than sea, with salt on my lips. Tomorrow the damp air will find me again at the sliding door. Morning will climb on. The first thing I will put on is water.

And when words blur and run, I will sit on the stone steps, sink my feet into the shallows, and let the city speak me through.

*In Scottish and Northern Isles folklore, selkies are shapeshifters: seals in the sea who shed their skins to become human on land before returning to the sea.