how to slip time

an early morning, late summer swim

Yesterday, I took my last swim of the season. The air’s been cold at night and it’s hard to jump first thing, but you have to if you want to slip through a magic loophole and remember who you’ve been and who you’ll always be—goospimply, childlike, a little eternal. First, though, you have to dawdle.

Evening mist on Lake Thun // Ferdinand Hodler

I love my red bathing suit. It makes me feel girlish and brave. Yesterday, knowing we were set to leave Mom’s lake house, I put it on first thing. After coffee, I stood at the edge of the long, stone dock, pretending I might not jump.

Playing with doubt is part of the fun. It’d be so grim to march down the lawn, walk across the stones and dive without a little what if. “The house isn’t far,” was a thought I allowed. “Nobody has to know.” The thing is: nobody cares. The people I live with never notice whether I come in wet or dry. They only want breakfast.

I spent a long time with my toes wrapped around the edge of the flagstones, staring at my body in the chilly wind. My belly poked through my hip bones like it did when I was twelve. My thighs were pocked from the breeze, every tiny, golden hair standing end-to-end. Looking down, I could be pubescent. I spent so many years whittling myself and later, swelling with kids and milk, but my body ended up the same. I’ve had some of my happiest observations while stalling a swim.

The wind picked up and I imagined sitting on the couch with fresh coffee, a hot toddler in my lap, thinking: “I’ll go later.” But I knew I wouldn’t. You only get one chance to dive in with dreams still on you—one chance to jump into the mist that means the air’s colder than the water. It’s a short few days before the lake takes the chill, even shorter when Labor Day’s early and departure’s premature. But for a little while, the lake holds the temperature of long, full days: days that always pass and finish more quickly than I realize because they drag so slowly at first.

“Jump now or you won’t,” I thought. “Don’t let this be the year you stop.” I’ll goad myself like this forever.

I jumped. When the surface broke and the world went silent, I was seven, darting through the brown-gold gemstone I lost at the edge of Long Meadow Pond, where we swam every day of every summer. The tiger’s eye was small and round, set in a thick, silver band. My father bought it for me at an airport. The ring was too big, but I loved how the yellow stripes shifted in the amber background: the stone was both dark and light, like the sun-streaked pond. Days later, I buried it, accidentally, in a sandcastle I was building. I think of that tiger’s eye every time I swim in freshwater. It’s with me more than it would’ve been had it fit and grown familiar and been forgotten in a drawer.

Yesterday, I sank and flapped my arms to stay face-up, joints popping, blowing big silver caps into the blurry blue above. Reality’s backwards underwater: up is down and the sky looks circular and small, whereas the water’s forever. The lake is wider and deeper than Long Meadow Pond. There, you could sink a few feet before your toes hit the creepy tops of un-seeable plants and the silty mush… the freakiest feelings on earth. But off Mom’s dock, I’ve never blown enough bubbles to touch bottom. It’s a free-fall, and I like that.

Surfacing, I realized the air I’d stood in, shivering and resisting, had been the hostile element. Is it like growing older, I hope? My life feels sunnier than it used to. It’s my birthday this month and I’m treading in a sweet spot, a phase that holds the warmth of many long, full days. Youth was like that chilly edge, all nerves and made-up doubts. Better stop the metaphor now, though, that lake can freeze pretty hard.

I flipped back under. My joints, oiled by frictionless twirling, finally stopped popping. I swam for a long time through the thickening streaks of sunshine.

When I pulled myself up the cold, metal ladder, I paused to ogle the pair of exoskeletons that have crouched under the flagstone lip for years. Max, our eleven year old, tells me these are dragonfly husks. It’s hard to believe—they look so squat and monstrous. I’m sure the elegant insects they became are long-dead now, but we won’t sweep their remains away. They’ve hung for so long, they’re symbolic: a secret, weird shiver for those of us who swim; a chance to pause between the water and the world and marvel, one last time, at the after-image of a life in transition.

Happy to be back. xx

Isabel