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you might get out before the devil even knows you're there
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It's a Wednesday. I'm at a pool.
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An indoor pool, which I haven't been in since college, when I worked at the YMCA and accidentally walked through the wrong door. But here I am. At the pool.
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I take a deep breath. It's a testament to the rearing of my generation, I guess, that I seem to find the smell of noxious chemicals deeply comforting.
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My friend is with me, a girl I've known for six thousand years. She was a varsity swimmer in high school, but hasn't really hit the water since then. I asked her to start coming to the pool with me, since the first time I swam I doggy paddled a couple lengths and then, at a loss for what else to do, challenged the lifeguard to a game of Marco Polo (he politely declined).
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We both cannonball into the pool. I like this silent agreement, that there is no other way to enter a body of water. I seem to have it mostly with people I knew as kids.
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She says, All right then, and sinks beneath the surface. I watch it close over the jagged hairline on her scalp, and then suddenly she's off, springing from the side of the pool, cutting through the water like a seal.
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She breaks to the surface, already almost a third of the length of the pool away, and starts slicing her arms through the water, twisting her head back in little jerks to take rapid-fire breaths. She is like this tigress clawing her way up a tree, this she-falcon in a free fall. I watch her cut two lengths of the pool and think, This is the most decisive I have ever seen any of us be.
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And I want that. I want to know where I'm going, even if I'm underwater. Teach me, I said, and she did, telling me what to do, watching my body, saying, Head down, and, Don't look forward, just watch the stripe beneath you. Everything you need to know right now is under you.
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And I felt snatches of it. Obviously I'm still more on the Marco Polo side of the swimming spectrum, but when I was trying to cut my arms through the water, when I looked at the line beneath me and saw I was on track, when I felt for a moment the incredible power of my body, the potential there to swim in oceans and climb up mountains and run across deserts, I fell so deeply in love. It has nothing to do with appearance. It's so outside that. It's a love of motion, a love of expressing with your body this celebration you feel inside your soul.
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I finished my last lap and jumped up and down, in the shallow end of the pool. This is amazing! I shouted. My body is amazing!
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No kidding, she said. Your boob fell out of your swimsuit. Tuck it in and let's go again.
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I remember now. I love to swim.
