On Not Learning How To Swim

I was swathed in sunlight, arms outstretched as though attached to an invisible cross, legs rotating haplessly, or perhaps determinedly. It was as though I could feel myself disappearing.

The swimming instructor, whose separate identity I had never properly allowed myself to imagine, was counting towards infinity: "Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four......."

As though such things were meaningful.

But as for me, swathed as I was in sunlight, simultaneously protected and imprisoned by a membrane wrought from my very essence, floating aimlessly and haplessly and hopefully.......

As for me.

Denouement loomed, cascading from the unblelievable swimming instructor's lips, a vibrant trout evading frantic bear's paws.

As "Thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine" - an echo from another world, amazing and unseemly, my somehow not quite plausible limbs refusing to conform.

Until it came to me: the countdown was a prelude to a kind of birth, or rescue. Veneers, I saw, can almost always be destroyed.

But the spurious allure of treading water, swathed in sunlight, arms invisibly affixed, vision stymied - all of this was preferable, somehow, to the stark indignity of exposure.

Perhaps believing that our inability to swim derived from fear of water, she had got us to submerge ourselves, and then, aloof, uncaring, reassuring stopwatch tightly squeezed, had taunted us unmercifully:

"Forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine......."

But I, deriving solace from my non-conformity, was still refusing to believe. I had, in fact, become defined by lack of faith. I would hang, and float, and waver, never rising. My very breath would become implausible, a kind of half-remembered legend, something mystical, subjective and surreal - a cipher. Ignoring what would soon become my destiny........

".....fifty-five, fifty-six, fifty-seven......." Her voice grown wayward, almost querulous - perversely reassuring.

So I broke the surface, spluttering my angst, defiant breath unleashed in fulsome, agitated waves, a brutal, unrelenting reflex.

I did not ask for this, I thought. I neither wanted nor believed in it.

Yet here I am.

Alive.