They warn you to be careful what you say around writers. My unsuspecting friend - who I had a wide-ranging chat with yesterday - bears no responsibility for what my writer-brain did with his comment!
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He'd tried lots of times, but he'd never been able to stay on the surface.
I remembered being seven and swimming only because I needed to breath. And being annoyed by it, because I’d discovered a new and more expansive “womb” beneath the surface. Similar muffled sounds, enveloping warmth, the colours more gentle-blue than living, pulsing, red. Where I wasn't a weight in anyone's world and there was all the space I needed to do nothing more than explore the space.
Above the surface, where my father was, where my brother was, where the oxygen was, where the cold changing room and the travel sickness of the bus ride home was... where, in fact, I lived... was a drier place, to be slipped away from as often as possible.
For years, I made a living as a life-guard. Staying on the surface, helping others do likewise.
He told me his wife was the same. And his children. They sink. They all sink.
“Maybe we are just denser.”
‘Maybe,’ I think, surprised by my envy, and the tug of those deep ripples of light. ‘Or maybe you are mer-people in disguise!’
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