The Swim
One moment and
You've looked past that
Old grey large building
And thought out what
May be that pond beyond,
And calculating distances, feeling
The irrepressible loneliness
Of those scattered, floating clouds above –
It takes but another
(Moment, that is) to consider
How new or old may be that giddiness;
As you race and pause and embrace
Finally, with relief, the release
That will be all to feel
Once one's drenched, one's
Gone under.
I was, in my childhood, an inveterate water-hater, there was once this (retrospectively hilarious) scene by a swimming pool where the trainer was trying to persuade me to the deep end while I was persisting in trying to climb up the wall, a tug-of-war that my undoubtedly well-meaning mother also joined in but which was seen by me as the gesture of ultimate rejection and betrayal.
Since then, the effect of water-shimmering-in-the-afternoon on me has been mixed: the still languor of the atmosphere, that very old fear at the pit of my stomach, added with a sense of anticipated thrill that I only tasted much later, after many failed training sessions. Swimming, in the closed community of this small town I grew up in, was a competitive activity entrenched in the process of a collective growing up: most of your friends (not to mention their parents) knew whether you could swim or not, just as they knew your rank in class and (if you were a girl) whether you could dance/sing or not. It was one of the rungs in a proper induction into both masculinity and femininity: one hallmark of a balanced upbringing for both boys and girls (balanced between studies and a right dose of extra-curriculars, that is.) It was not gendered like a lot of other things were, but still a locus of heavy competition, where rivalries and friendships mixed in the shared pursuit of growth. But also, it was a rare space where girls and boys could freely mingle and talk: and for me, that was doubly beneficial in the way I could chat with girls without surveillance and the awkwardness of any expected pattern of interaction, and also surreptitiously and cleverly glance at sleek male bodies climbing out of the pool.
It is weird, when one thinks how swimming is an activity of personal freedom in the sense of an easy and willed movement that can never be moulded or taught from outside, that it could become so social an activity in our town the way it did. Isolation and swimming became associated in my mind much later, when I was in my late teens, and was allowed to go alone to the pool when not many others would be there.
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