***
I loved to watch my goldfish glide through the water, darting from one side of their tiny tank to the other. I fed them and loved them, perhaps too much. They died, their bodies floating gracelessly at the top of the water. I came home from second grade one day to have my heart broken. We poured the water and the fish into the bowl of the toilet and pushed the lever down. Water rushed from the sides of the bowl, shiny, gleaming white, to flush our waste away.
Darrell’s fish always thrive. He has betas, guppies, black goldfish, gold goldfish, too many kinds for me to remember, really. One afternoon he holds up a large mason jar full of water. See them? he asks eagerly. Weird specks move haphazardly through the jarred water. They are guppies, just hatched. He lets me hold the jar, full of water and tiny new life. At that moment, I feel like the world is beautiful. The sunlight comes streaming in through the windows.
***
I cannot swim, but one Saturday I join my friends at the Aquatic Center at Ohio University. We are only high schoolers, but anyone is allowed into the pool so long as the swim team is not practicing. It is a pool designed for a swim team. There is a shallower end used for simple exercises. From there the bottom gradually falls lower and lower until it reaches a suitable depth for diving. In between the shallow end, what we refer to as the "kiddie pool", and the diving end there are swim lanes. My friends and I are wary of the lanes. Rumor has it that our math teacher, a skinny, unlikable man, frequently exercises in those lanes wearing nothing but a blue speedo. We are not anxious to see him here. We rent boogie board-shaped floaters to help us stay above water.
We decide to start out in the deep end of the pool. I don’t know why. None of us are divers and only one of us is a very good swimmer. I clutch onto the railing of the pool ladder for dear life. I try my best to merge myself with that ladder. My feet are touching nothing and I can’t see the bottom. I want something that will not move that will not slip out of my arms as I bob along. My heart flutters in a really unpleasant sort of way. I know there is a lifeguard, but I don’t want to need him. Relax, my friend Cammie tells me. We are not going to let you drown. I am not confident in her ability to save me. I continue to press myself into the ladder. Finally, after my arms begin to get tired of holding on, I grab the last, or second to last, step on the ladder, relax my body and sink into the water, still not comfortable enough to completely sink under. No matter how slack my arms or my grip get, I am not going to touch the bottom. I feel odd, suspended in this vast space. I find that there is something relaxing about it. It is not so empty as air, there is enough of a consistency to feel surrounded, sort of held. I am suspended, not forced or pressed, just suspended. My legs begin to float upward, and my body begins to become horizontal, my face falls toward the water. I panic and am back to grabbing the ladder.
Later, we find ourselves in the kiddie pool. I can touch the bottom, but still hold onto a boogie board. Occasionally, the board will drift with me to where the kiddie pool meets with the first swim lane. I try to put my feet down and can only touch the bottom with my toes. I do a stupid-looking hop dance back to the shallower end. This continues for a while, and since no one is really swimming, we soon become bored. A tiny adorable girl whom we had cooed at and talked to earlier makes her way to the diving end with her mother. We can’t imagine what she is doing going down there. We are horrified as we see her climbing the ladder up to the high dive, her mother coolly watching. She can’t be more than four! Cammie whispers, wide-eyed. The girl walks to the end of the diving board, high-it seems impossibly high for someone that small-above the water, and jumps off. The mother doesn’t flinch. We are standing, entirely unself-conscious, our mouths hanging wide open. There is a quiet pish! as she hits the water. The tiny adorable girl bobs back up to the surface seconds later, climbs out of the pool and back up the ladder to the high dive. We look at each other. We are amazed, but we wonder at her mother standing idly by the diving boards. When was the first time this girl jumped? How did the mother figure out that the girl would bob back up to the surface after the immense fall? A wrong landing from the high dive can leave an adult swimmer bruised and in pain. How did the mother know the girl would be alright the first time she made her way to the end of the diving board? Didn’t she know there was a good chance that the girl would kill herself with such a leap?
***
Most people are surprised to hear that I can't swim. Particularly after I tell them that my first dream in life was to be a marine biologist. I am fascinated by water, though, over the years this once glorious fascination has turned rather morbid. I used to marvel at life in the sea, in love with fish, their bright colors. I loved dolphins, too, and imagined each and every one was Flipper. The ocean was magic and everything in it danced to some music that sounded like it came from a Disney cartoon. Now I find it difficult to walk ankle deep into the water at the beach without my stomach turning. The thought of what is floating or swimming around my feet terrifies me. This fear crept up on me slowly. It is the collected weight of images stored in my mind: the body of a giant squid at the Smithsonian, the empty; searching eyes of a hungry shark; Discovery Channel camera shots of a vast, dark ocean canyon; the teeth of an angler fish; the worms that have attached themselves to the sunken corpse of a whale; an old submarine covered with barnacles, men's bodies still inside; the way my goldfish tried to nip at one another, eating each other as they died. My head spins when I think of the ocean. It's surface glimmering like glass, I ache with the fear of what writhes within the water. I am interested in what it holds, like one is interested in the things held by a morgue.
But the real reason I never learned to swim is this: At six, maybe, or seven, I find myself standing on the deck of Ern and Shirley's pool. Darrell took Sarah and I swimming. He is busy looking after her. She is four, maybe, or five. She has floaties on her arms and an intertube around her waist, but she is too adventerous for him to leave alone for a moment so he can watch me jump. As he fusses over something Sarah is doing, he yells over his shoulder at me not to forget to hold onto the intertube that I have around my own waist as I jump from deck to pool. But I am not really paying attention to him either. I am so excited that when I finally do work up the courage to do, to really jump, I throw my arms up into the air. I am a skinny child. On hitting the water I shoot right through the intertube. I remember that the pool wasn't that deep, and though I hit the bottom quickly, I didn't have enough strength to jettison myself back up to the surface. Darrell was going to help us learn to swim that day, but I didn't take to it very well. I try moving my arms and kicking my legs like he had told me earlier, but the water pushes back against me and it is stronger than I am. I stay there, sort of suspended, for what seems like eternity. I see Darrell's torso as he walks to me through the water. I feel his hands under my armpits as he lifts me to the surface and sits me on the deck. The deck is hot and burns my backside. He is asking me if I'm alright. I'm not dead, but I don't feel alright. The chlorine burns my nose and throat as I cough it up. A decision is made in that moment in my subconsious, one I am still trying to say no to. Sometimes my will is stronger than I'd like it to be.
***
I have searched all afternoon for a good translation of that poem by Basho. The one about the frog leaping onto the pond. A professor of mine mentioned it one day as he explained his idea of enlightenment. Something about the water, the sound of water. When we understand the moment, the movement of the frog, the ripples disturbing the serenity of the once still water, the sound the water makes, we will have reached enlightenment. I like this idea. I am intrigued by the idea of understanding the intricacies of such a small moment and what this small moment means in the larger context of life. I don't know if it will bring enlightenment. What is enlightenment anyway? Is harmony with all things really so desirable? Or knowledge so important. Sometimes having the answers only cheapens the questions. Perhaps this is what I am meant to understand.
But the sound of water. The sound of water is precisely what got me thinking about all this in the first place. The sound of water was the only thing missing that day I noticed the ice in the fountain in the center of Middleburg Plaza.
