I have always loved to swim. Here’s a rather poor poem about it (writ long ago and just now ruthlessly edited) if you like that sort of thing:

Used to be a mermaid—
tennis-ball lungs explained, passion for water
Ungainly halfworld thing
flopping fish tail.

My summer house,
chlorinated peanut of family sea
Water caress, the otherworld of stinging sight
Seeing jelly open to firm touch;

Water smoothed — swallowed dolphindive-wise
Plunge
silky kiss, pushing through embrace, face rushed—
Wishing never the lungs’ cry
Pushing feet to scrape on cruel matter,
erupting to air.

gambolling,
twirling otter sports
always tried to overturn, finish the flip…
always stopped when the mirror lapping above came near
when the second split into wrongway pressure
and the sun glinted silvered fear to my eyes
tight coil paused
and floundered back upright
Never turned into the blinking mirror.

I used to swim in Grants Pass, in that bowl of sunshine cupped in blue-firred hands. My cousins had an oblong pool with a dangerous, heterogeneously moistened slide; years of experience swimming; layers of muscle. All I had was sheer exuberance, but I would stay in, indulging that exuberance, until my eyes were layered with mists of chlorine and my fingers were somehow both raw and numb from their pale convolutions.

For some reason, I hadn’t swum in a long time until this weekend. Those cousins have grown up and their parents have moved away from the pool. My supply of swimsuits has run thin…out, even. This weekend — spent, coincidentally, in Grants Pass — I needed one anyway, so I hit the tag-end of several clearance sales (heavens forfend one should postpone buying a suit until early July!) and picked one up, just in time to swim in the warm, shallow hotel pool that night.

I had forgotten somehow just how much I loved it, how much the touch, the sensation of flying, the freedom appeals to me. It seems sometimes that it is my element (that or a library full of bathtubs — with typical geeky inconsistency I belong anywhere but here!), that I could bask in it forever (or at least until I accidentally imagine sharks.) I managed, for the first time in my life, to do flips underwater without chickening out, though I can’t do a backflip that doesn’t end in a strange contorting frontflip, chlorine up my nose, or both. I did handstands, raced, exulted and curvetted and emerged with red, veiled eyes and a happy, tired heart.

Somehow I hadn’t viscerally realized that my apartment complex has a pool until I spent today with a layer of longing. I came home and indulged that layer, took my exercise in the pool instead of on my be-Niked feet. My muscles are still singing softly of the effort that ‘effortless’ element demands, and my mind is so full of soft blue lappings that I feel sure I shall dream tonight of the sea….