Swimming
The locker room smells like chlorine and perfume and sweat. While I wait with the other 12-to-13-year-olds, it is all I can do to breathe. My white cane already feels far away in the beach bag at my feet. On land, that cane is an extension of my right arm, allowing me to navigate with grace and ease. In the water, it is a sinking log, useless. In the water, I don’t consider myself a blind swimmer, just a swimmer trying to win a race.
As Margot cues up Taylor Swift on her iPod, I find myself wondering how fast I’ll swim, how far I can push myself, and whether or not I’ll win a ribbon. I hope the four days a week I come to this pool to practice with Ms. Darcy—days when my skin is penetrated with the light of the hot sun and the sticky chlorine particles cling to my hair long after I’ve left the pool—will pay off.
I have no way of knowing that, in a year, my decision to focus on school and school only will stop me from competing in a sport I have grown to love, one of the only sports where I ever feel I truly belong. I have no way of knowing that I should have stuck with swim team through seventh and eighth grade and maybe even through high school, that I will need more than school in my life.
It’s the middle of April, so there’s a slight breeze. Goosebumps spring up on my arms at the thought of diving into the cold water. Taylor warbles about burning an ex-boyfriend’s picture—the perfect sixteen-year-old reaction to a bad breakup—her voice coming clear through Margot’s speaker. Mosquitoes buzz all around and I point the sunscreen nozzle at my skin and press down hard to keep them away.
One of the volunteers calls out for the freestyle swimmers to gather on the pool deck. I grasp Margot’s elbow and let her guide me to the edge of the tile that borders the pool, feeling like I’m missing a limb without my cane in my right hand. Cupping my hands above my head, I prepare my body for the dive that will launch me into the water. I hope I won’t hit my head on the bottom of the pool, though Margot has guided me to the safest possible place to plunge.
I hear, “On your mark, get set, and go!” followed by the shriek of a high-pitched whistle, and then somehow my feet are flying out behind me as my hands and body splash into the water. I loop one arm back and grab the wall. That wall is my anchor and, like my cane, lets me know just where I am. I gulp one last gasping breath, push off the wall and start stroking, right hand, left hand, propelling my body forward. The water feels vast, endless. Lifting my face to breathe slows me down, but my lungs plead for air, that desperate ache of dehydration and low oxygen. I tilt my head slightly to the right to take in a breath and suddenly hear my mom in the crowd, screaming, “Go, go, go!”
I plunge my face beneath the water again, and everything else falls away.
It’s hard to believe this pool is only forty meters, as Margot told me at the last practice. It’s hard to believe I can keep going. It’s hard to believe I won’t knock out my two front teeth on the sheer concrete of a wall I can’t detect coming. On land, it’d be easy—there would be a change in sound, in the acoustics of the location as the wall gets closer. There is only silence in this water. I’m hoping, praying, my hands will catch the blow as it suddenly looms.
Finally, my hands smack into cold concrete, and that’s it, I’m done. The race is over. I lie back on the surface of the pool for a second, my heart thudding in the best way. For the first time I truly hear the crowd, their screams and whistles and encouraging applause. I pull myself from the shimmering pool—the water rippling out around me with a huge, satisfying splash and collecting on the deck—and my mom is suddenly there to congratulate me on my first race, throwing a fluffy towel around my shaking shoulders.
Margot’s race finishes and she wants to know how mine went. She runs back to the locker room and grabs my cane. Everything clicks into place when the rubber grip meets my fingers, as we rush for the scoreboard together.
I don’t place, but somehow it doesn’t matter the way I thought it would, the way I was sure it would only ten minutes ago. What matters is that I did something I never thought I would or could a year ago.