Learning to swim

Doesn’t it feel sometimes as if somebody has just chucked you into the deep – before you’ve learnt to swim – leaving you to either learn to stay afloat, or to sink? The waters are deep unfathomable murky alien. You tread it desperately, thrashing your hands about ineffectually. Fighting fighting against being sucked inside. But sucked inside you do get. You swallow water. Into your throat, into your nose, into your lungs. You’re drowning. But something inside you makes you make that mighty effort and thrusts you up. Only for a moment. And you come up for air - choking coughing gasping thrashing. You fling your arms about, your fingers opening shutting clutching at something anything everything to grasp at – to hold on to, to cling to, to belong to. And you find a rotting piece of driftwood, itself falling apart, and you hang on to it – tight – in the mad hope it will keep you afloat, take you to the shore – though you know in your heart it’s not going to last. It’s going to break apart in sodden little rotting pieces that will disappear into the murk of the unfathomable waters. But you use it as long as it holds out, learning to beat your legs and hands in some sort of synchronicity, to learn how to swim in these alien waters. You hurry. You know it’s not going to last for too much longer. You thrash about at first. Fighting the waters. Fighting your bursting heart. Fighting the aloof sky looking down at you with blind eyes.

Then suddenly you begin to understand the laws of swimming, the laws of staying afloat, the laws of surviving. You slow down. You don’t try too hard. You let the water do the work for you. And you begin to breathe a little easier. You loosen your grasp a little on the driftwood you’ve been clinging to – so tightly that dark little rotting pieces come off in your hands. And you allow your muscles to slacken from their tight bunched up knots. And you feel the waters hold you up in its now silken soft arms. And you begin to feel happy – almost. Merely touching your driftwood with the tips of your fingers – just in case. And you begin to enjoy the eddying flowing freedom of the water. You even dunk your head in, underwater, confident of being able to surface again without choking and gasping. And you don’t mind too much drifting along in this limbo. When suddenly, from nowhere, a gigantic wave comes and rips into you. And your water world is all topsy-turvy. Waters are rushing into your eyes nose throat lungs screams chokes gasps from all sides. And you know that this is the end. That this is what the end looks like. Crashing pulverizing asphyxiating. And then, just as suddenly, the wave passes you by. Leaving you there in the middle – in that watery expanse –  under that huge unseeing dome – all alone. And you look for your piece of driftwood. But it’s gone. Disappeared into some unknown place in the deep. Drowned. Perished. Buried. And you know then that you can’t hang about too long – there in the middle of nowhere. So you begin looking for the shore. But the shore is nowhere in sight. So you choose a direction, arbitrarily, and begin using your newfound ability to stay afloat with tentative beating of hands and legs. And you discover you can swim. So you ford towards that unknown shore with renewed strength. Not letting the deep dark waters engulf you in that unknown fear that always lurks beneath the surface. Not allowing yourself to be submerged again. Not for the time being at least. Though you wish you could find your piece of rotting driftwood somewhere somehow. Swimming in alien waters feels so alone.

by Rita Putatunda