Sink and Swim - Or a deep cut for July's end

Been a minute! I’m at that part of the summer where I’m all too aware school starts soon (the pools close) but the dog days still sweat. Here’s a shoutout to Yana K. (delightful) who encouraged us to do a “Struggle Hour” which I thought might include getting a newsletter together. Instead we had adult swim. So here’s a newsletter, and I do hope to keep putting them out, and I’ll try, but this is a deep cut from over a decade ago now, and I think it got published in The Walrus under Aida Brown but I never got a copy. Oh, and I will still answer ANY advice question about ANYTHING. Click the link in the footy!

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Two summers down post-college, and a nine-to-five. Mid-July. You start going to the pool. There is a schedule no one seems to follow. Somedays the line outside the East gate is thirty deep, all kids and hip girls and thick-necked boys that are kids or maybe have them. 

Somedays you are lucky and the pool is mostly empty. You change at work and ride your bike to the park, lock the frame, never bring a towel. You sit and dry in the summer swelter and concrete scorch. There's occasional flashes of envy at the ex-art school graduates in two pieces that both look fifty years old but can't be, and you know the envy comes from wishing they would talk to you as you bob near the edge. 

The swimsuit you wear is two years old, bought on your college commencement weekend. You feel constantly breathless and also so heavy, and yet you know you are stronger than you were those days. Or at least older. Or at lest it is a common relief, now, to not have any flying fuck about where you are going. Two years ago it was a down, deep, shameful secret. Now it is a shrug, a factory brand. 

Really you decided, even desperately searching for work in an economy thrashing about like a catfish and living with your parents in the suburb you fled four years earlier, you absolutely needed to stop drinking for a while. It was in the bloat. It was in the cope. 

Now, here, this summer, the swimsuit is too big on you. Fabric bunches about the hips and crotch. Sometimes when you practice clean dives into the deep end, you panic and think the halter strands untied themselves  around your  neck and are about fall and reveal your somehow smaller breasts. This has yet to happen. You were bigger, then, when you bought the swimsuit. Bloated with beer and late night binges and hell, probably tears and now you know the freshman fifteen is more like four years of freefall, up and down. Two months to graduation your high school on-again off-again boyfriend dumped you a month before graduation. And then he flew across the country to attend the ceremony, get stoned in Golden Gate Park, and pretty much break up with you again just East of the Mission Dolores Bell. Three or so hours of dumping. 

Afterward this you walked up Valencia sobbing uncontrollably only to be stricken with a freak nosebleed near 23rd, where you crumpled to the ground until a British tourist saved you with napkins from a nearby bar. The story is dark and hilarious now, in a way. It sort of was then, too. You have told it to every person you've chosen to kiss or go further with since then, in both an admission and a test. The fail rate has yet to be determined.

These days, either idly stroking across the short width of the pool, or slowly sinking in a tiny ball, you don't think of it. The point is to not think. It is sheer coincidence you sometimes swim with the boy you are obviously in love but got stuck in faketionship town with. The point is to jump and float. To let go eight hours, heartache, heat, the lack of any good damn tomato in the entire city, and remember how to keep breathing.

Your mother and father got you the swimsuit at a Target near Milpitas, CA. The one-piece was one in a string of tokens from them seeming like penance and relief. They took your best friend and yourself out for falafel, and sushi after your vaguely poetic but mostly pandering Baccalaureate speech, tapas after the commencement ceremony Your mother's anxiety spiked, but was tempered in public. Your father was proud and mostly focused on the rental car. They finagled a deal on a business traveler's hotel thirty miles south of your Oakland college and cute, radical apartment with blue siding. Your mother hated this situation but it mostly made you tired (hotel, apartment, college). But Christ, the hotel had a pool. 

They bought you a swimsuit while you intermittently, stoically bawled on the phone to your ex-boyfriend who had yet to dump you again in the park. When everyone got to the hotel (which included the aforementioned parents, your little brother with a bad dye job, and your nearest family friend so essentially big sister), you escaped to your sister's separate room, frantically smoked a cigarette, and vowed not to cry. Together, you, brother, sister,  splashed in the pool surreptitiously while your mother read a magazine and your father checked his Blackberry. Later, all of you bundled into the rental car to your communal friends and family graduation party. In your radical, college apartment backyard, you got tanked with your nearest and dearest. 

Now at the pool you're sober. You would never do that at this park (during daylight) and besides, you come straight from work. Mostly your evening swim is solitary and besides, drunk nightswimming is best done in lakes or perhaps rivers. This is learned on an angsty nightswimming trip in the midst of a July heatwave after a jealous blister pops between yourself and the faketionship. Four tall boys in, you jumped off the sidewalk jutting out East from the planetarium with another twentysomething city friend. You no longer care what's in the water, only how you feel clean and breathless climbing up the yellow safety ladder. A large Eastern European couple who were swimming at dusk vow to look out for you. When the swollen, colonial CPD cruiser drove by on the sidewalk, you and your friend hid the beer cans and you said your hair was still wet from the beach that closed at seven. Assholes! You wanted to say, but it was almost midnight, and eighty-five degrees. Be. Fucking. Cool. 

By now the pool is about clarity. You are twenty four in your umpteenth Midwestern heat-sodden summer. The new beats your heart shakes keep your brain far away from any of the past (could it be said that was the worst time you parted ways with someone? Don't hold your breath, maybe). You did finally get a job. You moved out. Your body shrank and evened out. You tell people it is due to the obsessive bike riding you adore, which is partially true. Still, there are nights of beer for dinner, an obsession with cheap produce at your neighborhood grocery stores, mirrors, thrift store jeans. 

And you have a job. At work, you change clothes about twenty minutes until quitting time and clamor to your coworkers about the pool. They also think you slightly insane for your unairconditioned, second-story apartment. But aren't all of you insane for your daily punch into your world? You are a corporate virtual assistant for lawyers, a plebe and serf of thirty-something developers and ex-tech workers (who are salaried and ride triathlon bikes and have summer hours) and most days your job is pretty much lying. You use your degree in manicured and precise emails and eloquent phone presence (unless the client is in the Bronx). Its the first 9 to 5 you've had and you get health benefits and a company holiday party. 

Sometimes people yell on the phone or cry or slur at you. Pretend Girl Friday, you, for attorneys and sometimes investment firms in Staten Island, Philadelphia, Jacksonville, Omaha, Tacoma. They handle wills and bankruptcies and drunk arrests and divorces. Most days you wonder how you thought you could ever attend law school. You wonder if attorneys go to law school to forget social norms and mores, and learn how to dodge phone calls and bills for their piss-poor practices. 

Swimming is a way to walk the line between desperate want, and gratitude. After all, if you had some coveted job in publishing or radio or food blogging (all things you once thought possible), then the pool would escape you. Returning to your neighborhood becomes an act to look forward to when you wake up and ride your bicycle to your office in the morning. It is familiar, and sweet, and in the summer there are children everywhere and paleta carts and the sun lazing behind the coal plants. Of course burns the hope you will see your tango partner from non-committal town riding too, or even at the pool, or drinking a beer on a patio. You swam in your Oakland college too, hashing out the pathos of communal living and hormones with your friends. 

Every day the pool closes too soon. The heat keeps you from burning electricity and consuming the internet all night or watching lots of television or cooking actual, square meals. The pool closes too soon when you don't have anyone to go with you to the dewy dark of the lake, or to lay on picnic tables, or to eat cheap tacos. Where will the hours go before you end up waking up in the relative cool of a morning, drink old refrigerator coffee and dread the next eight hours of administrative work? When will the tango partner who you are rapidly and frantically realizing you are falling in love with call you or appear near the gate or check the mail? You watch the lifeguards begin their sentry around the pool edges and take a deep breath. You sink. 

Eyes open and oxygen dribbling back to its home, you bob in your knee-grabbed bundle, stare at legs and thighs. The chlorine scalds the scab on your shoulder from a night concert in the park when you raced your roommate home and took the Aquarium corner on the lake front path too closely, then threw yourself in the path of your bike frame to protect it. It will heal after you pick at it, and all winter you will rub your fingers over it longingly, the island of a summer, of pain, of laughing hard and sharing beer and candy with strangers. 

Whistles. Splashing. A teenager makes a futile and final cannonball and gets scolded by his lifeguard girlfriend. Channeling the eight year old gymnast still inside you, you push yourself onto the concrete and slide your sneakers on your nowhere-near-dry feet. Grandmas and little girls shower and make chisme in the locker room, but locker rooms have never been your friend, so you dart for the door. The park fills with older kids and drunks, and you drip your way to the bike rack. You pull on some baggy cutoffs that still manage to elicit whistles and, Ay, mamis! in any neighborhood, unlock, mount, and start pedaling. 

The sun will set in two hours and maybe you'll end up on a couch, trying in vain to conjure words to express how you feel about anything, or maybe you'll go to the bar, or a friend's air-conditioned studio. Most likely you'll end up sitting on your stoop, watching your neighbors, listening to headphones, drinking beer to forget how hot it is and how maybe the summer will never end and how you sincerely hope it does, no matter what. The pool will end up reminding you of your need for places only for you, for ritual, and tradition, in whatever way percolates. For a time you'll be amazed at the novelty of it, of the joy of infatuation. Then, remember, this is how you've always loved things. Languid breakfast in a dormitory, or study trips over giant sandwiches, or bus rides to the beach—all of these are the same as board game nights in a rich friend's condo or making bread in your Cold War-era oven. 

They are the same as when, in the future, things fall away from each other and apart, but never to lost pieces, and you'll find more time than you thought possible. The ritual then turns itself into riding a bicycle in rain, snow or wind, and doing your dishes, and pouring a bit of a drink (but never seven tallboys) and sitting on the same stoop, children gone, snow or no. You will first think you've changed completely from the girl tramping around ocean-scented streets, but realize most things are the same, and change is possible. Not always. Not without desire. You will realize being in love doesn't end, although sometimes it is possible to figure out when it begins. You'll probably move closer to the pool and Lake and better tacos. You will try to remember how to breathe while smiling, walking, riding, groping, smoking, drinking, clenching, and living so far away from water. 

You are lucky. You are letting go and you are staying put.