The shallow end greets me like an old acquaintance who can’t quite recall my name. I shiver from the cold or maybe doubt, then submerge, finding my way to horizontal, hands meeting overhead, biceps cradling ears, legs kicking through resistance. I streamline underwater until my lungs yell at me to surface. My first eight, nine, ten strokes are clumsy, but then everything clicks into place. Muscles remember.
Flip turns connect me to the next lap and the lap after that. My body moves without thought, syncing techniques that were shaped at eight, nine, ten years old. With each breath to the left, I match a breath three strokes later to the right, the tendons in my shoulders familiar with the ice packs required as a result of favoring one side. Curiosity and determination team up to compensate for the speed and endurance stolen by time. Water still mystifies me, it still appears at the edges of dreams that wake me with a momentary panic that I’m late for practice. It still holds fears of failure I once vowed to leave behind to drown.
Returning to vertical, I bounce up and down in the water, stretching shaky triceps and trying not to compare myself to the nine, ten, eleven other adults in the pool, my competitors, as I was trained to do. The lean bald man whose snorkel eliminates the need to concern himself with air supply. The young couple sharing a lane, ticking off the sets in a workout written on a piece of paper slicked onto a blue kickboard. The chatty elderly woman aqua jogging with a flotation belt wrapped around her waist, a full face of makeup and a trail of perfume I followed out of the locker room. I wonder what series of events in their personal histories had brought them all here to converge at this exact moment, this exact place, if those events were remotely similar to mine.
The ghosts of coaches past are here too, but only one still haunts me, only one I can still see pacing up and down the edge of the pool, hovering, analyzing, critiquing my every move both within and well outside the realm of his authority. The one with the twitching black mustache, the anger contorting his face and his self-important stance begging for respect. The one with the shrieking tirades he called motivation, his words shrinking me with nine, ten, eleven variations of the same sentiment. You are not good enough. You will never be good enough.
I rotate and switch to backstroke, my view now the ceiling as I picture him floating up and away from me. My arms windmill in and out of the water while I silently tell him all the things I should have said but wouldn’t, couldn’t. I will not lose more weight. I will not push through the pain the doctors warn could be permanent. I will not believe I can’t succeed without you. I will not trust you. In ten, eleven, twelve seconds I see the flags lined above me indicating the wall is approaching. I inhale visions of newspaper clippings glued in scrapbooks, shoeboxes overflowing with medals, my signature accepting the college scholarship, and after somersaulting into a new lap and pushing off the wall, I exhale flashbacks of the scales and weigh-ins, the injuries and burn out, the tears and regrets.
I stop to rest, wiping my goggles and the mental slideshow clean. My sight clear, I seek total release, sprinting with whatever reserves remain untapped. My heart rate spikes as it did in every race throughout my ten, eleven, twelve years of competitions, my rarely used fast twitch muscle fibers thanking me for including them. I grasp the top of the wall as it breaks my momentum, panting, internally recording an accomplishment that can’t be measured by a stopwatch, needing no one’s approval now.
I begin my cooldown, my kicks barely making a splash, fatigue replacing proper form. The muffled silence underwater pulses in my temples, the stillness louder than my introspections. The solitude never bothered me back then. I never questioned the countless hours spent sharing space with peers yet able to speak only through body language. We moved around and alongside each other, sometimes offering mutual encouragement, sometimes inducing envy, always aware we were on the same team but simultaneously fighting for individual wins. Friends whose dreams matched mine, who understood me like no one else could because the demands of the sport are so unique, bonding us forever. Now I see older versions of eleven, twelve, thirteen of those friends as I scroll through social media, some reliving those days through their children, maybe some, like me, nursing mixed emotions toward an entity that consumed our lives a lifetime ago.
I peel off my swim cap and sink, tilting my head back as I stand to let the water smooth my hair. I try to figure out if I got what I came for. This was a recalibration of body and mind, a test of sorts. Could I still do it? Did I even want to? I hoist myself out of the pool in one fluid motion and walk the eleven, twelve, thirteen steps to the entrance of the locker room where my towel hangs on a hook. “See you next time,” the lifeguard says with a wave. I smile and thank the teenage boy who looks around the same age I was when I finally decided it was time to stop. I’m not sure if I’m thanking him for the invitation to return or the realization I’d like to accept it.
In the shower I rinse away the stink of chlorine that defined my childhood, the itch that stained my nostrils and flaked my skin, the chemicals that faded my bathing suits and left green highlights in my yellow ponytail. Every inch of me is already sore and aching a mere twelve, thirteen, fourteen minutes after stripping off my Speedo. It’s the good kind of sore though, the kind that quietly, gradually turns into power.
I return to the pool twelve, thirteen, fourteen more times, my middle-aged muscles remembering again, again, again. New imprints intertwine with the old, not as replacements but as reconstructed relationships with the shallow end, the fears, the ghosts. As past guides present, as pain guides strength, muscle memory forgives, but it never forgets.
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