Leg stretched skyward, foot with its chipped black polish braced against the wall by the open window, I concentrate on the shimmer of tendons beneath my skin. Like light caressing a swimming pool’s chemical clarity. A reminder of depth. An invitation to dive.
Remember: chlorine greening gold hairs and burning nostrils; a clinging purple one-piece patterned with lime palm trees; a gash from jagged metal, not blooming red until my childbody emerges onto slippery land and then I pour everywhere, stain everything; gasping for breath across the daunting length of the deep end with near-certainty of impending death; whisper-taunts in the locker room about budding breasts, so ubiquitous that puberty becomes an urban legend, haunting the closet; upside-down as Hanged Men with Claire, walking on our hands where the water’s shallow, where I can be safe and reframe the world’s oppressive shape into something silly, something freeing. Surrendering to discomfort, I can breathe.
At twenty-one, I injured the tendons atop my foot via roundhouse kicking for kickboxing class. It remains unclear to me whether I was roundhouse kicking incorrectly and this repeated misstep led to my downfall, or whether I followed instructions to a T and still my body did not wish to hold against the waves lapping its levees with barbed tongues. Against the body-solid bag that represented danger. Pain rang like church bells, and could only heal through time untouched. If I wanted to walk comfortably, I had to lower my defenses, stop practicing to snap my leg in the manner of a frog-boy’s greedy tongue.
In X-Men spinoff TV series The Gifted, teenage Andy’s mutant powers rise destructively to the surface of his mind at a dance in the school gym (re-gendered Carrie, with disappointingly less blood). Buried energy: prompted by the blunt forces of fists and dehumanization to seek gasps of fresh air. Hurting, his strength rises, rises, breaks toward sunlight and mimics the friction of tectonic plates. His sister, Lauren, has to step in with her own more fine-tuned mutation to usher their bodies free of the crumbling structure, architectural meteor shower. This disaster grabs the feds’ attention, and Andy and Lauren and their parents flee.
At the motel where they’ve tucked themselves away from the prying eyes of government drones, Lauren asks her brother, “Who taught you how to swim?” Andy doesn’t answer. Her question is rhetorical, the answer living on his skin like hair, bacteria, a bedtime kiss. She taught him how to swim, and she can teach him this as well: how to utilize his powers safely, with a steady-handed measure of control. In a way that will not necessitate running, hiding, fearing.
Once upon a time, I was not afraid to swim in the ocean. My swimming abilities might be sub-par, but still I ached to throw myself into blue tumult, to bob and weave and inhale snouts of microscopic creatures, to emerge onto shell-studded sand with my body one bruise. One wound inundated with salt in a good way—pain amplified so loud as to be a siren: undeniable. I am a response to an emergency; get the fuck out of my way.
The last few times I’ve been to the beach, I’ve shivered and balked to submerge this flesh any deeper than my thighs. Winced violently at sprays of crashing wave skimming my face. While my boyfriend happily surges forward, seeking weightlessness and a fight he’s sure to amiably lose, I retreat to where surf kisses sand, and sit in the warm bath of it, gazing out to the horizon, or to Sam’s shrinking and tumbling body, or up to ads for beer and Minions movies streaking blimpwise through blue sticky with cloud residue. This most recent bout of flinching away from the water on my face, something clicked, so sharp and clear I felt it should have been an instant revelation.
I cannot feel safe in the water if I cannot feel safe in my body.
My trust in my ability to ensure my own survival is the blood-bitter gap where a baby tooth used to live. Before first wiggle, repetitive tonguing, and final shock of biting down only to have nothing with which to bite. Living in this body is biting with a ghost. If I were to manage to swim, in this era of my corporeality in which I flutter, fatigue, and unwittingly flex with puppeted violence—origami fold into the shape of something drowning—my success would be courtesy of a phantom functional nervous system. That jellyfish of an internal compass, map, and pocketknife.
The subtext of asking, “Who taught you to swim?” is declaring, “Since I can teach you to swim, I can teach you to do anything.” Or is it a more fidgety, particularly toothed tool than that? If I can teach you to swim, I can teach you to manipulate time and space. But don’t ask for any of the smaller stuff, like how to paint your nails without painting your cuticles. How not to let dishes pile up in the sink.
I did not know how to swim as a child, yet I was possessed of a confidence in my body’s invulnerability that I can no longer access. My twenty-eight-year-old body knows how to push water free of its path or lift when the wave lifts, becoming a single stitch in the oceanic fabric. And yet, if the water licks my face like an over-excited dog, I’m done for. I know I’ll drown in seconds. My twenty-eight-year-old body that falls to the floor and convulses. The twenty-eight-year-old body in which I can feel clawed creatures scurrying.
The subtext of clarifying, “My tendons healed,” is not declaring, “If I can heal from fighting too hard, I can heal from anything.” But my tendons did heal. They invite me to dive. I sit in the surf and I think about mutants. I think about the abandoned factory of my body, and what’s grown there, what’s growing there, what will grow there still, verdant from watering, blooming like blood when I emerge from the pool and I see I’ve been hurting this whole time.