Not the last summer — you don’t know it’s the last one while it’s happening, that’s the whole tragedy of it. But there’s a summer somewhere in your early teens where you were still the kind of person who got in the pool at ten in the morning and got out at five in the afternoon and that was the entire day and it was enough. No agenda. No sense that time was being spent on something that should produce a result. Just hours of water and sun and pruned fingers and the particular exhaustion of having done nothing for a very long time.
At some point after that, swimming became something you do for thirty minutes with intention. Exercise. Laps. Getting somewhere. The pool became a tool for a goal rather than a place you just existed in. And the weird formless hours of childhood water time just stopped, unremarked upon, because you were becoming a person with places to be and things to do and a growing awareness that lying on a pool raft for four hours is something you’d have to justify to yourself now.
What I miss isn’t the swimming exactly. It’s the relationship with time that made it possible. The complete absence of the sense that something else should be happening instead. Kids at a pool are not thinking about what they’re missing by being at the pool. They are entirely at the pool. That’s the thing that goes away gradually and then all at once and doesn’t really come back unless you work very hard at it, and working very hard at being present is its own kind of irony that I haven’t fully resolved.
I got in a pool last summer at a friend’s house and floated on my back for about twenty minutes staring at the sky and it was the closest I’ve come in years to that old feeling. Not quite it — I was still aware of time passing, still aware that dinner was at seven and I’d need to dry off and be a person again — but close. A thin slice of the original thing. Enough to remember what it was. Enough to miss it properly.
This summer I’m going to get in a pool and stay there until I don’t feel like being there anymore. No laps. No plan. I say this every year. This year I might actually do it. The bar is low. I just have to float.