Open Water

It is the night that the narrator meets his future lover in a pub basement during a birthday party. The young man takes his friend Samuel aside, saying that he’s about to make an atypical request. Samuel teases him that such a disclaimer usually means the narrator has actually done this before. The protagonist asks Samuel to make an introduction between himself and the woman, Samuel’s friend.

The narrator imagines a background fantasy for the coming meeting, giving it a soundtrack of upbeat classic R&B with everyone dancing “like it was the eighties” (3)—with liberation. He interrupts this by remembering that he swore honesty and describes himself going for a handshake before clumsily hugging the woman. The two have nothing to say, but the interaction doesn’t feel awkward. Samuel informs his friends that they are both artists, a photographer and a dancer. The conversation takes off and the narrator notices that the woman has the same south-east London accent that he does.

The narrator offers to get the woman a drink before realizing that Samuel looks hurt because he’s been left out of their chat. The narrator offers to get everyone drinks, which makes the woman laugh. Suddenly, he is pulled away to take a photo of the birthday girl blowing out the candles on her cake. From there, the young man continues to take photos of the partiers. When he is able to separate himself from the mass of people, he looks for the woman whom he just met, but she has left.

The narrator explains that winter “is the wrong season to have a crush” (6). Summer is the correct season when a new love interest is invigorating. The narrator imagines going outside with someone to get away from a sweaty party, smoking a cigarette in the hot night and watching the paler blue of the summer sky.

He describes the woman he met at the pub to his younger brother, Freddie, getting frustrated when Freddie says that he was drunk and can’t remember seeing her. The two men sit drinking tea and listening to records, which scratch at the end and beginning of the side. Freddie asks what the narrator is going to do about his crush, and he admits that he doesn’t know because the woman is actually dating Samuel. Though he does not shame his older brother, Freddie suggests that the narrator cut off his interest in Samuel’s girlfriend.

The narration asks how it is possible to halt the seed of desire once it is acknowledged, although the narration also points out that desire often goes unreturned. This leads the narrator back to his preference for summer flings, as there is so much more to distract oneself from a crush. He notes that in summer he parties and makes many brief connections, whereas in winter he stays home. However, the chapter ends with the idea that, “to resolve desire, it’s better to let the thing bloom” (9) and allow oneself to feel the possibility.

The narrator recalls a terrible summer when his grandmother died, which he sensed through intuition at the time. He imagines an interaction with his grandmother in which she cooks and he tells her about the woman that made such an impression on him at a bar. Though he frames it as “a memory of a different time” (10), the scene is in future tense.

In response to his gushing about his crush, the narrator’s grandmother is lightly amused and encourages her grandson to continue. He tells her that both he and the woman minimized their artistic careers in their first encounter. His grandmother asks why, and the protagonist hazards that it was out of fear of greater loss.

The grandmother points out that “[t]here’s no solace in the shade” (11), and the narrator agrees but says the meeting was too short and a bad time for a deeper interaction. His grandmother returns that it never feels like a good moment for such things.

The sky over the interaction gets darker, as the young man explains that the woman made him feel something new. His grandmother uses the same seed metaphor the narrator used in Chapter 2 to express that such a feeling can only expand. The narrator agrees. He tries to explain that he intuitively knew the woman and knew that he would see her in the future. Confirming that this scene is a fantasy, the narrator imagines that his grandmother would let this be the last word on the subject and laugh.

In the last days of December 2017, the narrator and the woman get together at a bar. They sit on a green sofa and jump into wide-ranging conversation with a surprising intimacy. The narrator feels that they create their own world on the sofa, separate from the hostile one around them.

The woman asks why the narrator downplayed his work as a photographer. He tries to articulate that he wants to protect his creative work and that someone else calling him a photographer honors their perception more than his own. She asks why another’s perception changes what he thinks of himself, teasing him when he sidesteps the question. He eventually explains that “when you let people in and you make yourself vulnerable, they’re able to have an effect on you” (13).

Deflecting questions about her dancing, the woman asks the narrator for his feedback on her idea to create an archive of Black people through photography. He pretends that he isn’t interested, which prompts her to hide in her coat. When he tells the truth that he wants to be involved, they get celebratory drinks at a new bar. The two get giddily drunk, the woman reaching for reflected city lights like she could hold them and briefly dropping her head into the narrator’s lap.

They go to Shake Shack and listen to music on shared headphones while they eat. The narration poses the question of whether anyone noticed the deep connection happening in that Shake Shack. They take the London Underground southeast and continue listening to music on her headphones. She asks what the narrator’s favorite song is, prompting a discussion about rapper Isaiah Rashad’s first album. The narrator doesn’t share that he listened to this album constantly the summer that his grandmother died, especially the song “Brenda” about the rapper’s own grandma. He chooses a different song on the album for them to listen to. Another Black couple witnesses the narrator and the woman singing along joyfully.

Neither want the night to be over, so the narrator goes to the woman’s apartment (which she shares with her mother) to have tea. They are careful to avoid physical intimacy. The woman remarks that her mother doesn’t often warm to people like she did to the narrator.

At a phone notification, the woman states that Samuel is coming over. The doorbell rings as the narrator says that he ought to leave. The interaction between the three of them is awkward, and the narrator feels ashamed, although he has been careful “not to breach a border” (18). He knows that the seed of desire is growing despite it being winter. Wearing a green coat, the woman walks him outside and he agrees that he’ll text her.