6/25/02: Underwater
I swim twice a week nowadays, for an hour each time. I go for a mile and a quarter, which is 42 laps. Back and forth, back and forth. I wear earplugs to prevent that awful water-in-the-ears feeling and I wear goggles to continue seeing. The goggles are tinted blue and when I wear them I feel a little like they are sucking my eyeballs out of my head. If it weren't for that, I might swim forever once I'm in.
I don't notice much once I'm in the water. The earplugs and the blue of the goggles combine to make the outside air seem like underwater -- everything is silent and blue. I swim and I breathe in such a rhythm that I don't notice that I can't breathe underwater. I can hear only my breathing and my heartbeat and the movement of the water around me and I can see only the blue of the water, and its surface -- the silver dividing line between water and air. I only smell and taste the chlorine that I can't keep out of my nose and mouth. All I feel is water. Once you're completely soaked, water doesn't feel wet anymore. When you're moving fast, it doesn't feel cold. It just feels like resistance, and eventually that doesn't feel like anything.
Most of the time I'm counting. I count laps, I count strokes, I count breaths. I count miles swum, calculate percentages, count laps to go. I count bathing beauties, painted on the wall -- three. I count my legs, still two, my arms, still two, my heart, still only one. The more I swim, the easier it gets until at some point it becomes difficult again. I should not let that be a metaphor for anything.
Sometimes I tell myself stories. I think about a person I know, imagine bumping into him on the street. I think about a class I'm teaching, go over my lesson plan. Sometimes I pretend my boat has sunk and I need to swim to shore. Up ahead I can see the lights twinkling from the harbor of Santorini. Soon I will be at its beautiful red cliffs, and everyone will rejoice that I survived.
Sometimes I am angry. Sometimes every stroke, my arms make fists and fight through the water, and when I kick, I am kicking not to move forward but to inflict pain. I think sometimes still about those days after 9/11, when I swam a lot, terrified that someone might drop a bomb through the roof of the gym. I was so angry at what had happened, so broken and miserable that I needed the time to make my brain so full of numbers and blue water that I would forget what I was angry about. I am still angry about it, but now I am angry about other things too. The one doesn't push the other one out.
When I get out of the water, I take off the blue goggles and it's like the sun has come out, and I realize sometimes blueness can be self-inflicted, and I hope that that's a metaphor for something, something so good, I can't think of it right now.