The Tide

I am on a precious 15-minute break from teaching a summer writing course to incoming college freshmen. The students have mostly dispersed from the basement classroom I’ve been assigned, quick to escape to the stairwell to huddle in small groups and giggle and flirt with each other, to zone out while scrolling on their phones or take a little walk. I sit at my desk at the front of the room and open my laptop. I pull up an article on plastic pollution I’ve been avoiding reading because I know it will only depress me. Today it calls to me, magnetic, inevitable. I take in the words, “Preparing infant formula in a plastic bottle is a good way to degrade the bottle, so what babies end up drinking is a sort of plastic soup. In fact, it is now clear that children are feeding on microplastics even before they can eat.” The background hum of chatting students fades to a dull, pulsing crash, like waves, so that when I close my eyes I can feel the warmth lapping at my feet, engulfing me, until I’m drowning in it, this plastic soup, the chemical sea, it’s inside of me, a part […]