Swimming Lessons

1. Same Shore, Uncommon Experience

She and I got caught up in the same riptide, different years, different times.

Strangers adrift conversing about common ground. Until in her recounting, I heard a foreign word. I cringed inside, realizing she’d just described how I later drowned. Washed up on shore, and died.

Sundrunk. We swam from the fog into the sea, suddenly aware of being pulled away into infinity. She exclaimed the first rule: “Do not panic!!!!” We laughed how she pondered: “Should I? Or should I not?”

The question, of course: which diagonal to take to swim herself free from the wake. Or so I thought; it was all I knew. But she had been taught better.

She called out “Help!!!”

Her name was Katie, or so she said. But it was “Catherine, we got you!!” that kept her from the dead. Some “Water God” friend of hers on a raft nearby calling her by her childhood name, responding to her cry.

2. The Pacific and I

Before I knew her uncommon common sense, her different menu of social experience, with choices of a far different extent, I on the same beach without a voice where each droplet had drifted, each grain of sand shifted, yet the arrangement the same, the waves, the shore, remained.

Just the Pacific and I upon it lifted when I felt the pull. Though there were people all around, I didn’t make a sound. I swam like mad, a ragged horizontal to the shore and on the beach laid quietly, in denial.

3. Swimming Lessons for Me

Started at age 3 when I was told to walk the plank and jump and did, then sank. Memories from the womb, they said, should be enough. Like they still say these days, be “badass” and tough, weaned on the rough. Snowflakes melt into the sea, and I wonder even now what if it had been me to join that body of water permanently.

“It’s all up to you” in the USA. I flailed away ignorantly, invisible bootstraps, fashioned mostly from my own flesh, exhausted myself for decades on dry land, never thinking to ask for help.

Escaped into nowhere, twice rescued by strangers who tried, came and went like threads of a frayed rope to a rocky shore, shadows as I was only to live on the edge of my skin, no safe place to fill in and join in, to float, trapped in a social moat.

As a teen, I snuck into an apartment pool when no one else was there, made myself splash alone.

I threw myself in again in my 20s, determined to bathe in nature, not questioning why we were on the river alone. Record frigid flow that spring, sandy wet suits at dawn, a wounded soul at the helm, her secret death wish in tow.

“Back paddle!” “Right Back!” “Stop!” “High Side!” “Lean In!”

Out I went into rocks sucked into its undertow, round and round seeing an occasional orb, a sun above small and made of waves, a bad washing machine dream. Couldn’t feel my limbs, dissociation …I was used to that, but this time it was complete, couldn’t feel my feet. A trainer's voice came back to me and said, “Stick out an arm or leg though you don’t know where they are” in hopes the current will grab you like a speeding car into the river’s flowing rapids with names like “Meatgrinder” and “Satan’s Cesspool.”

4. Her Swimming Lessons

She reflected, “Had you not yelled for help, you’d have exhausted yourself and drowned.”

That, exactly was what I had done, not that day in the sun but later on solid ground where I never cried out into infinity for someone to help me, oh, concerned demigods with smiling eyes and long arms or a buddy with a raft.

She taught me that drowning people’s flailing fright will take you down, unless you approach them just right.

I almost learned decades later how to save my own life (but not alone) when taken so far out we saw no land, my first dive unlicensed, trained for just a day. I froze on the water’s surface unable to descend. Already some decades had passed, and for the first time ever, a guide reached out her hand, and my world found another filled with warmth and light, and we made the descent together. Co-dependent for a spell, I thought I’d want to hold on forever, but I gladly shook loose her grasp to be free in the wonderland of sea, seals swam directly at us dizzyingly fast, and only by a whisker, then passed. I felt solid bright, not shadowy love that day. That being scared was okay. That help was on its way. Help looked me in the eye. Now that I am drowning on dry land, fate and circumstances shifting like sand, I ask for help but bewildered people look away.

The story around here they say is that everyone has to make their own way.