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 of me, and the tide is rising and I can’t breathe. A group of students bursts through the door like a failed dam, laughing at something one of them said. They’re bumping up against each other, young and bright and vibrating with worry and joy. My students are smart, sometimes even wise in ways that catch me off-kilter: a quiet insight that stills the room with its trueness, a thunderclap, the hair on my arms electrified. They lob stunning acts of kindness at each other in the most casual way, their own kind of wisdom. You’ve been drinking it since before you could eat, I want to tell them, it’s inside you now, and it’s inside me, and it has been for as long as we’ve existed, and it will be with us until long after we die. I think of endless wars, castles falling into the sea, particles floating in baby bottles, of my generation, our hands, that held the bottle to your lips. You file back into the room, crinkling open chip bags and sliding phones into back pockets and swinging half-empty bottles of Diet Coke in the air so that the amber liquid compresses against the centrifugal force, motion made solid, and suddenly I see myself as you see me. Eyeliner smudged down my face, tracing scant half circles beneath my eyes, a whiteboard marker clutched in my hand, the plastic slightly greasy, my thumb capping and uncapping and capping again. Diminished in the corner, I peer at my screen, laughably incapable of stopping or even slowing the tide, which is around our ankles now, the water warm, amniotic, clinging to pant legs and slicking the painted walls; we watch it climb into our laps, swelling, retreating, the particles swirling within the viscous soup like flecks of mica, facets catching the fluorescent light, detritus rising with the water, all those chip bags and soda bottles, crumpled candy wrappers, sheets of torn notebook paper, loose caps from our pens, and it’s up to our chests now, the threshold of air meeting water tiptoeing up our throats, we crane our necks as it overtakes us, slips between our lips, this soup, till we’re flooded, submerged, and the room calms. I stand. I consider your lives, the unknown shape of them, the infinite surprises and the slow accrual of days. You turn your faces to me, one by one, and I know I’ll always think of you like this. Quiet, open, on the brilliant cusp.

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Hea-Ream Lee’s essays have appeared in Ecotone, Shenandoah, Terrain.org, Popula, Essay Daily, and others, and her work has been anthologized in The Lyric Essay as Resistance (2023). She has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference and the Wormfarm Institute. Hea-Ream received her MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Arizona. She teaches creative nonfiction in South Carolina, where she lives with her partner and cat.

Photograph by Sherry Shahan