The Michael Phelps of Feelings
I didn’t know, before, that it is possible to be addicted to chlorine.
Or maybe that’s why anyone swims: forget the health benefits, the animal joy of cutting through water by force of your own skeleton and skin. The smell is the thing, that timeless sharp tang. Suddenly you are in every pool you’ve ever dipped your toes in, sunning afterward on a stiff towel, watching a cute boy somersault into the deep.
At my chosen indoor pool, there is no sunning, and there are no cute boys, which is how I like it. I prefer my fellow YMCA comrades elderly and just trying their best. I will allow cannonballing children, of course, as well as peppy middle-aged fitness instructors. Little shivering minnows at their first swim lessons are enough to break your heart. Their goggles seem so huge, and their rib cages so tiny — what can even fit inside? {“What is this, a rib cage for ants?”}
* * *
For two years, at least three times a week, I have faithfully donned a bathing suit that flattens everything worth looking at and slipped into the deep end. Treading and kicking alongside a co-worker friend who floats effortlessly, we talk about work and finding good pants and the past.
Almost anything seems manageable in the water. Problems of the day, and worries about how little I know about anything, unspool out of me and shimmer on the surface before disappearing into the Speedos of lane swimmers. Since I am not going in after them, the only thing to do is close my eyes and welcome the cocoon of echoes and splashes. I cut through the water without proper form but something like aplomb; the pool is one place where the impressive span of my thumby oars makes sense.
* * *
A favorite former student of mine is sometimes perched in the lifeguard’s chair, and every time I haul myself out of the water, a soaked polar bear heaving its heft onto a slippery ice floe, I think: HE CAN SEE ALL MY NOOKS AND CRANNIES. THIS IS THE HEIGHT OF INDIGNITY. I blame this anxiety for a recent dream: on a sunshine hike with friends, this same student got tired and I had to carry him on my back. The dream version of him was so thin and frail his spine looked like a marrowed ladder.
In the pool, the terribly frail do their best alongside the sleek and strong. One toothpick-limbed elderly man has told me his life story on many different days, always the same way: the loss of his infant daughter {a triplet}, the much more recent loss of his wife. “She deserved better,” he mumbles softly, paddling nearby. If my friend and I try to respond soothingly, he cries.
* * *
I don’t fully understand the science of buoyancy. I float, churning my way from pool end to end. I hold my breath and rise to the surface, bobbing uncertainly, other swimmers bisected by light above and then deeper blue. What I leave behind are the heavy things, the parts of life that can’t be puzzled out on land. And what I take with me, even into dreams, are new chlorinated questions.
