Agua, Por Favor

I went swimming today. Nothing can describe the fantastic feeling that is swimming. The way the water glides over the skin, adhering yet passing over the flesh. The weightless feeling that arrives when plunged into deep water. The way one's body can float on the top of the surface of water. The look of the sky while floating on your back, arms spread wide, and your ears filled with water and hearing nothing. It's amazing. I love being submerged in water, the smell of chlorine filtering into my nose, the way that smell comes off your skin after swimming and not showering. It smells of summer, of fun, and of freedom.

Since I am a big girl, being weightless or at least feeling so does not occur very often. No one picks me up, no one sets me on their lap, and I feel the weight of myself each time I stand. My bones, muscles, and tendons groan against the weight that I carry and to feel lighter once in a while is perhaps one of the greatest joys.

I floated today. It was peaceful.

A little girl came to swim after a while. She was delightful in her brattiness. Her mom and her mom's boyfriend were swimming with her. When the mom's hair became in her face or something, the boyfriend was assisting the mom. The little girl shouted with much determination and steadfastness, "Don't mess with a woman's hair." I laughed heartily and this little girl and her opinion, which is very correct at times: Do not mess with a woman's hair. Then she shouted at the boyfriend, "Get away from my mom!" She was serious, but yet she wanted to play with the boyfriend, taunting him, "You can't get me, John!" John would chase after her, growling a little just to scare her. She would giggle and ask her mom to save her, to help it. She was funny and so earnest in her pleas.

So, I swam, I let the water take me with it. I let it absorb me into a cloud. I floated into the sky and came down in a chilly rain that drenched a poor farmer's drought-ridden field. I was a drop splashed from the pool onto an old woman's arm as she walked by on the way back into her apartment from grocery shopping; I was the drop that reminded her of a time when the pools were segregated by color, when little black children would cling to the chain link fence and watch with envy at the wet, white children. I was sucked into the filtration system and was cleaned and sprayed out back into myself feeling my head become my feet and my feet get sucked in again. I clung to the shorts of a man who came to merely dip his feet in the water. I went back into his apartment and heard his conversation on the phone with his girlfriend. I heard love and then evaporated back into the air. I swam and came back to myself, leaving the water to be water, and me to be me.