The water is fucking cold. I hate when this happens. I’m going to have goosebumps for a few laps, at least. I dip my wrists in the water because my grandfather used to say that that was a quick way to get your body to acclimate. How do I know that he used to say that? Did he say that to me, or did my mom tell me that he used to say that? Did I ever even go to a pool with my grandfather? He’s been dead for twenty-four years and I remember lots but I don’t remember a pool. In go the wrists anyway.
I haven’t been a child in a long time. I turn twenty-nine today, and mostly I feel like why isn’t it thirty already. I have earned thirty.
I can’t remember the last time I felt like a child.
When I was a kid I thought the age that I was, the number, was wrong, should be higher.
When I was a teenager people always called me mature, which I knew I was supposed to take as a compliment, but mostly it felt like I knew things I shouldn’t know yet, and if I was so mature why couldn’t I just get on with my life already, go on to make the non-renounceable decisions of adults.
When I was twenty-three years old someone whose children I cared for guessed that I was thirty and I thought for a long moment before correcting them. I used to make people guess when they asked my age; I knew they’d guess wrong. I stopped doing that last year.
I haven’t been a child in a long time, which means that I have been carrying her around, the child-me, for about two decades, hoping that one day someone will take her off my hands. So far that hasn’t happened.
Sometimes I’ll be walking somewhere and suddenly notice my hands are in fists.
I choose to be responsible for things, I suffer the consequences of my actions. Someone told me once that being a grown-up is mostly making decisions until we die. Who will suffer the consequences of my actions then?
I guess there is no possible succession plan for that.
At the pool I don’t make decisions. I am responsible for nothing, not even my own life. That’s in the hands of two teenagers who sit in very tall chairs.
I don’t pull my wrists out of the water after I’ve dipped them; instead, I stretch out my hands and plunge under. I swim really close to the bottom of the pool for as long as I can hold my breath; the proximity makes me feel like I am moving faster than I am. I flip over at the end of the lane, look up briefly at the silvery underside of the water’s surface — like liquid mercury. For a single second I think about my uncle’s brother who killed himself by drinking the mercury out of a thermometer.
I was a kid when someone told me about that, and now I think about it literally every time I flip over in the pool, so I wonder how much of a kid I no longer was after that moment.
My feet fly over my head, land on the wall, push off, turn me into an arrow. On good days, I forget what side of the pool I’m on. On really good days, I forget I am breathing. I don’t even have to decide when to stop. My body does that. A breath gets stuck in my head, or water goes up my nose. Suddenly I am lead. I stand up, stick my head out of the water, pull my goggles up onto my forehead, wait until I am light again.
Somewhere between the doors and the water I have become not-myself. I cannot see me, just the left arm, arcing out of the water, fingertips flinging droplets into the air.
The water feels soft as it slides between my front teeth and the inside of my lip. I am body, not person. What a relief.