Before COVID, I would swim…
Before COVID, I would swim. I’d begrudgingly force myself to go to 24-Hour Fitness, that cesspool kept unclean by the bodybuilders and the folks swinging from ropes and hanging upside down on bars. I would escape the noise of the barbells banging on the floor and the huffs of exertions from the muscle men to take a dip in the pool.
I often was the only person in the pool — a vast welcoming cerulean, comforting my bones, caressing the aches and pains of the day. Not just physical pains, but when my face would hit the water, and I’d look to the pool floor, my mind would clear. All those entanglements with my ex-partner flashed through my head and escaped with each stroke of my arm. With each kick of my leg, all that rejection from casting director offices dissipated.
Before COVID, I had serenity. A cool pool enveloping me. Swaddling me. Caring for me in its chlorinated embrace — unlike ocean swimming, here I was safe. I could stop at any time, and my feet could touch the floor of the pool. I could float, I could tread water, I could do whatever stroke moved me — not having to tackle incoming tides.
Before COVID, there was this: a flat surface without waves, a still mind, a heartbeat ascending and descending, a steadiness of breathing, a feeling that I was doing this swim for now, for this moment, and tomorrow would bring another swim, and another, and with COVID, I am walking in the quicksand of fire-soaked air in Southern California and excessive heat warnings, in clothes that don’t breathe, with lawns decorated with Black Lives Matter signs or MAGA signs and the boiling of conflict in suburban manicured lawns contained with property — the Earth divided into that’s mine, this is yours.
In the pool, I could put us all in, we could all float, we could all feel the buoyancy and comfort of still water and how effortless our motion is in that water, how free…
But now, during COVID, we are land creatures, trapped by Facebook newsfeeds, and NPR reporting, and 24-hour television news cycles, sinking in the boxes of our apartments or in the palaces of our mortgaged homes or withering in the tent cities found at underpasses of freeway. We are one big solid iceberg, slowly disintegrating, not able to see the edge of where the ice ends and the snowy flat surface begins. We are imprisoned by our devices.
Before COVID, I would swim. I would swim away from this. I’d swim so long, that my hands would be wrinkled, and the skin on my toes would peel so when I returned to the land to walk on its surface, I’d be made fresh again.
