Finding my joy Again: MY story

That goddamn battleax was hogging the one fucking swim-lane again. WTF? She was always there at 8:30 pm. The pool closed at 9. I could have gone earlier but it took that long to motivate myself to go at all. And she was supposed to share the fucking lane.

 

Annoyed, I slipped under the lap lane rope and moved to the free swim side. I  curved my back against the pool light and deliberated about how I might navigate through the teens playing chicken to get my laps in.

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I felt dead inside. Not a new feeling. It made sorting out how to crisscross around six rowdy preteen boys and one younger sister and swim laps just another burden. 

 

Why? Why did I want to swim in a straight line? To pound water fast enough for my heart to play footsies with my tonsils? To do flip turns, repeat the same strokes meticulously counting kicks and strokes and breathes? Why?  Who cared how many laps I completed, how fast I was, how good my form was? Where was the joy in that?

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Where was my joy? Why had it forsaken me? All my life I'd been the sunlight. People said that they thought of me in their darkest hour. Yet, there I was without a pin, password, passkey, hell, I couldn't use facial recognition to locate my joy.  
 

In desperation, slumped against that underwater lamp, I said, "Come out, come out wherever you are."

 

As if stirred by me verbalizing my wish, my joy answered with a memory.

 

It was a bright sunshiny day. Hot as fuck outside. I was a girl in a white one piece with hearts all the colors of the rainbow. I was in the shallow end of a lukewarm swimming pool. I tried to stay off my toes because they were torn up from being rubbing up against the pool bottom so much. My fingers were pruned. I was telling my friend Carrie which mermaid she was going to be and which one I was going to be. We were running away from someone. We plunged beneath the water. I latched my ankles to each other and squeezed my legs together to make them into a fin. We wiggled our way under the rope into a deeper area of the pool. That was swimming. That was living.

 

I gave up on swimming in a straight line that night. Let the battaxe  I snaked some flippers that a kid left behind off the surface of the water and slipped them on my feet. I swished through those kids and said fuck you to ever swimming in a straight line again. I found my joy. I'm here to help you find yours.