Swim Until You Can't See Land
the water is taller than me
I’ve learned how to swim. Not in the literal sense; that happened when I was five and thrown mercilessly into a pool by someone trying to help me get over my fear of water. I didn’t even realize how much I’d been floundering until I started kicking my feet and moving my arms and swimming. I don’t want to say I’m thriving - not yet - but I’m getting there, I can feel it in reach.
Learning to swim on your own is a lonely endeavor, but it’s best that way. There are a lot of well meaning people who will try to steer you and guide you and hold you up, but it’s usually on their terms, they want you to do it their way. You have to do what’s comfortable for you, whether it be treading water or doggy paddling or even doing broad strokes.
I’ve been mostly bobbing in the water, letting the waves take me wherever they go. Sometimes I go under, but I emerge eventually, still eager to conquer the vast ocean that lies before me. I’ve been out of breath, I’ve been exhausted enough to want to stop swimming, I’ve been caught up in the undertow. I keep at it, I keep putting my head above water. I am swimming.
It’s been two months since the ocean of heartbreak and loneliness welcomed me. That may not seem like a long time, but when you’re alone time has a way of moving like sludge, and it’s felt like forever. I’ve learned a lot in this time. I have learned that I am capable, that I am stronger than I gave myself credit for. I have learned that life doesn’t end when a relationship does. I have learned to trust myself. I have learned how to swim.
I’ve always been afraid of the ocean, of any kind of open water. I don’t like the way the water stretches out to unimaginable lengths, to horrifying depths. The vastness takes my breath away and I respect as well as fear that water, knowing it could take me under at any time, that I could be swept up in a wave and tossed around the sea until I find myself lost and adrift. I have never been a very good swimmer; I can’t hold my breath longer than twenty seconds, I have a hard time maintaining the good, consistent stroke needed to keep me afloat. I’d go to the beach with my family and stay at the water’s edge, letting the water rush over my feet and when I’d feel the pull of the ocean as the waves got sucked back into the sea, I’d turn in fear, run back through the hot sand to the safety of our blanket, away from the ocean that always threatened to take me.
I never learned to like the water, I never learned how to swim well. There was always someone there who said they would hold my hand, stay by my side as I tried to navigate the waves, but I didn’t want to depend on the strength of someone else to save me. Better to just not go in at all.
I find myself at an ocean’s edge and I’m alone. The water pulls me in, I falter, I stumble, I am carried out on a wave. I panic at first, sure that I am going to drown. I flounder and slap at the water with my arms, forgetting everything anyone has ever taught me about swimming. I want the ocean to take me. I want to give up, go under. I don’t care if I emerge into sunlight ever again. The thing I feared most - the loneliness of the open water - is now something I’m willing to give myself up to. There’s land behind me, I know. But that land is now barren, emptied of anything I once loved about it. It’s not my safety net anymore. I wonder what’s on the other side of this ocean. I wonder what would happen if I just swim, if I just move my arms and kick my legs and keep going. So I do that. I swim. I swim away from the land, into the sea, all the while thinking there’s got to be something better at the end of the water. That I don’t know if the water ends doesn’t matter, it’s a chance I’ll take.
It’s freeing to know I don’t need anyone else with me, that I can do this without a hand to hold, a voice to guide me. It’s also freeing to give myself up to the water, to dive in without knowing what waits for me at the other end. It has been tempting to go back to the land I know, to the surety of solid ground. But I know that going back there isn’t going to feel the same as it did two months ago. Things have changed. The ground is no longer sacred. I am already in the water and it’s time to sink or swim. I have chosen to swim.
Dip a toe in the ocean, oh how it hardens and it numbs
The rest of me is a version of man built to collapse and crumb
And if I hadn't come now to the coast to disappear
I may have died in a landslide of rocks and hopes and fears
So I swim until you can't see land
Swim until you can't see land
Swim until you can't see land
Are you a man? Are you a bag of sand?