The stinging is a sharp, alkaline betrayal that turns the world into a milky smear. I am standing under a stream of municipal liquid that is supposed to be neutral, but right now, it feels like 11 needles of chemical fire. My eyelids are squeezed shut, yet the surfactant has already made its way past the defenses. It is funny how we trust the fluid that comes out of the wall until it starts dissolving the protective oils of our corneas. This is the core frustration: we treat this substance as a background character, a boring utility that we only notice when it fails or when it hurts. People walk around dehydrated, their brains shrinking by 1 percent, yet they claim they don’t like the taste of what keeps them alive. It is a fundamental disconnect between the organism and the environment.

The Sommelier of Water and the Lie of Purity

I think about Thomas F.T., a man who made a career out of being a water sommelier, though he would throw a heavy glass bottle at your head if you called him that to his face. Thomas F.T. once told me that most people are drinking dead liquid, stripped of its soul by 31 different stages of reverse osmosis. He would sit in his studio, surrounded by 41 different carafes from the French Alps to the volcanic ridges of Japan, and he would weep for the people who thought a plastic bottle from a gas station was the pinnacle of purity. To him, purity was a lie. Purity was an absence. He wanted the minerals, the grit, the 21 milligrams of magnesium that make the back of your throat feel like it has actually touched the earth.

We live in a culture of the ‘just.’ It is just water. It is just a job. It is just a body. This reductionism is the rot at the center of the modern psyche. When Thomas F.T. would taste a sample, he wasn’t just checking for contaminants. He was looking for the narrative of the stone it traveled through. He could tell if a spring had been over-pumped or if the local aquifer was being squeezed by 51 different industrial interests. He saw the politics in the precipitate. He once spent 31 days in a remote village just to study how the local limestone changed the way the villagers’ tea tasted. He found that the tea was a secondary experience; the water was the primary text. Most of us are reading the footnotes and ignoring the story.

[The fluid is the only thing that remembers the beginning of the world.]

Thomas F.T. didn’t care about the money, which was his greatest mistake and his most beautiful trait. He would spend 21 hours a day researching the mineral content of glacial runoff while his bank account sat at a precarious $1. He didn’t see the numbers as anything other than a distraction from the TDS (Total Dissolved Solids). I remember him standing by a river in Oregon, holding a glass beaker like it was a holy relic. He looked at me with those watery eyes-always watery, as if he were perpetually on the verge of either a breakthrough or a breakdown-and said that we were all just walking columns of sea water trying to pretend we were solid. We are 71 percent ocean, and yet we spend all our time trying to dry ourselves off. We build roofs to hide from the rain and then pay 31 dollars for a fancy bottle of the same stuff collected a thousand miles away. It is a comedy of errors played out on a planetary scale.

The Final Pairing

Thomas F.T. ended up moving to a cabin where the water came directly from a well that he dug himself. He claimed it tasted like the year 1921-a vintage of deep earth and cold silence. He stopped caring about the sommelier circuit or the high-end restaurants that wanted him to pair their 51-dollar steaks with the perfect sparkling mineral water from the Italian coast. He realized that the pairing was a gimmick. The water shouldn’t accompany the meal; the water is the meal. Everything else is just flavoring.

I turn off the faucet. The silence that follows is heavy. The 11 drops remaining in the showerhead fall with a rhythmic precision that feels like a countdown. I think about the mistakes I made today, the small errors in judgment, the way I snapped at a person on the street for no reason other than my own internal dehydration. We are irritable when we are dry. We are brittle. We need to be saturated to be kind.

He argued that water remembers everything it touches. If that is true, then I have just been washed in the collective memory of a thousand miles of plumbing. I have been touched by the ghosts of 111 different people who used this same water before it was recycled back into the system. It is a disgusting and beautiful thought. We are all bathing in each other’s history. There is no such thing as a private shower; we are all connected by the same continuous loop of liquid. You can go 31 days without food, but you won’t last 11 without a drink. We are fragile machines powered by a very simple fuel.