cold swimming
thoughts on REM, fuzzy memories, and frigid water
I don’t know why I started cold swimming. And I don’t know when I’ll stop. But I know it was cold outside, and I was walking by a new swimming area, cut into the harbor. The sun was getting lower, but still bright, as if saying ‘this is your last chance today.’
It was not an overpowering desire or aspiration. I didn’t really want to
Instead, I had the simple, silent knowledge that I was going to swim.
It wasn’t really a choice.
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I knew it would be cold, but again, it was not a choice.
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in middle school, i once rode in the car of my favorite teacher on a school camping trip. as we drove to virginia beach, or somewhere nearby, he played nightswimming by REM. i always thought that song was about cold water, because I associate the night with the cold, but writing this now, I realize that’s not true. in 2017 in Bali I played It at night, telling the guys, hey wait, one more song. we’d been listening to rap or party music, but I put on REM and floated, looking at the stars, realizing that we’d never be back there again.
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stepping into the frigid water in Sydney harbor, i faintly thought of him, and the song, and that moment in bali, but mostly I thought of the teacher’s sister who smoked, whom I never met, or even seen a picture of, but who I knew lived in australia, a place that had seemed impossibly distant at the time I first heard of her. now, years later, floating in the water in Sydney, i wondered if i’d walked by her as a stranger, or felt annoyed when she took too long ahead of me in line at a cafe, unaware that some shadow of a childhood memory connected us.
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she was just a faint memory, or really, a shadow of one.
how many people, i casually wondered, remember me the same way?
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i kept drifting, head half in water, eyes to the cool, decaying daylight.
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after seeing a seagull arc above me, i got out of the water. goosebumps all over my wet body, I slipped my feet into my running shoes, tied the now half-damp laces, slipped on my dirty shirt, and jogged home.
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