Nobody taught me.

I want that on the record at the top, because when people find out I swim they assume there was a lesson. A shallow end. Somebody holding me under the belly and saying good boy in a voice they use for nobody else.

There was none of that. I fell in.

What happens when you fall in is that the water is already deciding things about you. It does not wait to see what your plan is. My legs are four inches long and there was no version of the afternoon where the four inches were going to be enough, so the four inches went anyway, very fast, in the direction of the edge.

This is the part I would like to describe accurately and cannot. I do not know what I did. I have no account of the technique. I was in and then I was at the side and there is nothing in between that I can hand to you.

People bathe in a river in India and the water there is not clean. Everyone knows it is not clean. They go in anyway, all the way under, and they come up and it has counted.

Nobody in that river is swimming well.

That is the whole thing. Nobody is doing it correctly. There is no correct. There is a man who has traveled a great distance and he goes under and comes up and something has happened that would not have happened if he had stayed on the bank being dry and having opinions about the water.

I have opinions about water. I would like it noted that I have never once entered water on purpose since. This is not a contradiction. The sacred thing happened to me and I am not required to go looking for it again.

But I did it. Badly, without instruction, with the wrong body, and it counted.

If you are waiting until you know how, I would gently point out that the water is not waiting with you.

• • •

Fall in.