Imagine this.
You
push open the garage door, and the creak echoes ominously, bouncing off the tiles over
and over. You can somehow hear the blueness of the space, the
water, making the echoes fuller, more resonant, as you close the door and flip flop over to the
side of the pool.
A
deep breath fills your lungs and the space; arms up, and you plunge in. The
sudden shock of cold on your skin is amplified by the simultaneous shwump of your ears submerging, and you
suddenly become aware of your body, visceral, somehow apart from you and also a
part of you. You allow yourself to simply drift in the water, limps sloshing
lazily, listening to your own blood vessels, and the watery hum of liquid waa waa-ing, filling your outer ear. The
sound of your neck popping crackles like an old radio, inside you and all
around you. You stay near the floor, tap the tiles, exhale. Bubbles issue from
your mouth and surge to the surface, gurgling low and rich. You exhale as much as
you can, feeling your lungs burn, feeling the vibration of the displaced water
around you.
Out
of breath, you hold still for one moment longer in perfect silence. You are
gone from yourself.
Then you struggle upwards, break
the surface with a roaring gasp and suddenly you land back in your own body,
the echoes of your own noises bouncing around the walls, off the garage door, multiplying. You swim
a lap to the steady rhythm of shwump
in and splash-gasp out. Each duck
into the water is a mini version of that first plunge, and by the time you
finish your swim and you slip slap back to the locker room, dripping, you are
more content inside your head and for the rest of the day no one and no thing
can wedge its way into your skull if you don’t want it to.