The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [90]
Middle-aged women like me show up too - most of them do not have the stroke quality of someone who has competed - but I am filled with wonder at them anyway. They put their bodies in the water to swim the same way that I do. Maybe they are trying to shed pounds. Or maybe stress. Or lives. Or maybe it just feels good - being alone in water - no kids hanging on you, no husband to tend to, no one and nothing to answer to. When the pool is full I’ve noticed I’m among the first they will ask if they can share a lane. They must be able to tell I’m going to lap them and lap them. But there must be something more important that draws them to my lane. I think - I hope it is that the water is safe.
Gay men are there too, I can tell. Their legs will be hairless or they’ll be wearing earrings and, well, the only other men besides athletes who wear Speedos are gay. I sometimes have to fight off strange impulses to crawl over the lane line into their lanes and hug them - to thank them for being the men they are - men who showed me love and compassion at every important moment of my life - even though we are strangers.
Occasionally a swim coach will show up. I always get the same question. “Did you compete?” I nod and dip back under quickly. It’s not a conversation I want to have any longer, and they often ask me about joining Masters Swimming. I don’t want to join Masters Swimming. I want just to be in water.
In the voiceless blue. In the weightless wet.
À La Recherché du Temps Perdu
SOMETIMES I THINK THINGS OUT IN THE TIME IT TOOK me to win a race. 200-meter butterfly: 2:18.04. How long it takes to walk from my car to my office. 100-meter breastroke: 1:11.2. How long it takes to brush my teeth. It’s what swimmers do. It’s muscle memory.
I remember things badly. When I look back, things are underwater, and when I pick them out and bring them to the surface they float around my idiotic attempts to drag them to land. I wonder what memory is, anyway. What writers are doing when they scratch at it. Usually I think of Proust, who tried to write a sentence about memory and ended up with seven volumes about nostalgia.
In psychology, memory is an organism’s ability to store, retain, and subsequently retrieve information. It lives in the head, lights up with synaptic firings, and travels the waters of the nervous system.
400-meter individual medley: 4:55.1. How long to nuke a frozen Lean Cuisine.
According to recent neuroscience studies, the act of remembering triggers nearly the same activities in the brain and its circuitry as the actual experience. They found this truth in rats and lemurs. Little wires sprouting from their heads.
However, narrating what you remember, telling it to someone, does something else. The more a person recalls a memory, the more they change it. Each time they put it into language, it shifts. The more you describe a memory, the more likely it is that you are making a story that fits your life, resolves the past, creates a fiction you can live with. It’s what writers do. Once you open your mouth, you are moving away from the truth of things. According to neuroscience.
The safest memories are locked in the brains of people who can’t remember. Their memories remain the closest replica of actual events. Underwater. Forever.
When my father drowned in the ocean it took me the time of winning the 100-meter breast stroke. To reach his body. By the time I had dragged him to shore, I’d won the 200-meter butterfly. By the time an ambulance came, I’d won the 400-meter individual medley,