Two Months Before
My rough, coarse hands grabbing onto hard iron. The buzzer rang out echoing off the walls. Lurching forward off my metal podium I glided through the air with my arms extended to a crisp point at the top. Then my body just hung there and all I could feel was weightlessness. With a sudden jolt my skin started sliding into the water and I feel tranquility knowing that I am in my element again. Knowing that I am yet again in my place of calm and happiness and also knowing that I was away from the world above that was always hustling and bustling. A world that never stopped to just pause and rest a moment.
As my body starts to go into the pre-rehearsed complex motion of the butterfly, I look over to my left and right and see nobody around. Looking down I see the halfway marker at the bottom of the pool and know it is time to come up to the surface to start breathing. My muscles flex and feel almost alive as they ascend to the surface. The water tension was not going to break of its own accord so in a bubble of water I pushed my body to the surface. As the surface tension finally started breaking, I did a great lunge and knew I was up.
I took a stroke with my head still down and pointing at the water. Two kicks later my head started breaking the water, my body doing the work for me. I sucked down a heap of air and threw my head back down into the water just before my hands plunged back down. This cycle I repeated down the pool until I did a neat flip turn and then repeated the cycle back down the rest of the length of pool.
My hands slamming into the side of the pool and I felt a sense of joy. Knowing I had just made the U.S. Olympic team. The U.S. Olympic team! As I swam over to the ladder that jutted down into the pool I felt a surge of happiness from a well deep within me.
When I pulled my head up above the water a swarm of cheering almost made me duck my head back under the water. It was like a dream, a fantastic dream; but it wasn’t, it was real. When I stepped out of the water onto the pool deck I was almost pushed back into the water by a swarm of my friends, and family.
My coach was the first person to reach me though and he said, “Great job Andre, but now we are going to have to work even harder.” And it seemed to me he just always had to remind me that I was going to have to practice even harder.
When my family got to me they started congratulating me in their own way.
“We are so proud of you,” my mother sobbed.
“You were fantastic out there,” my father told me.
And of course my sister sarcastically remarked, “Congratulations, now you are a big snooty hot-shot swimmer.”
My friends finally reached me and put me back in line by saying things like, “Great, now we’re going to have to go to London just to watch you swim.”
But I couldn’t even hear them talk to me because my name was being put on the board of people who had made the U.S. Olympic team. It had been a dream of mine since I was a little kid. This is by far the happiest moment of my life.
Present Day
Water just flows through its states of being unlike anything else. It is always flowing to the next place, whether that place be a lake, river, or ocean it is always moving to the next phase; one continuous cycle.
If only life could be that simple, my brain said, If only we can flow to the ocean and then magically get to start over in a place that we already were at.
I just wish that I can someday go back to being the professional swimmer I used to be, my brain continued as I looked down at my amputated leg and crutches.
Without realizing it my gaze rose to look at the dark blue, tumbling water. My heart surged with jealousy, because it can cycle back to where it has been. My gaze dropped as I was startled to see myself become jealous of water. It seemed that I had become nothing more than an ex-swimmer who had nothing left in life.
So I crutched my way back to town over the wet sand that you can only find in Washington. The hard, sturdy grass cut across my foot as I hobbled my way to the shabby yet homey town. The sign that greets the summer tourist was just an old piece of driftwood that Willappa Bay’s strong winds had molded into a faint reminder of the tourist town that once was.
It was starting to rain so I hobbled even faster into the Old West-like town. Typical for Washington, the rain started even though the sun was bursting through the clouds. Yet I can see no rainbow because it isn’t a happy day, it is just another hard life as a person that, just like this tourist town, once was.
My little house I called “home” was on the other side of town, and I was in no mood to put up with the soaking rain so I stepped inside a deserted shop. I quickly pretended that I was looking at some of the merchandise. The young store clerk quietly averted her eyes because she felt sorry for my state of being.
Because it was a bookstore it was easy to give a false impression that I was reading the books, and eventually I found a book that was actually interesting. So without taking my eyes away from the book I hobbled over to a chair and sat down with a creak of the old wicker on the hard wood floors; and this is how I stayed for a long time, so long I think that the store clerk left. But as the darkness grew so did my curiosity in the book, so I decided I could stay a while longer.
It wasn’t until I heard the bustling from in the back of the store did I realize that I had stayed for hours. And I could tell the old woman that came to close the store was surprised to see me still reading.
“You know you’re supposed to buy the books before you read them,” she commented.
When I didn’t respond she compressed her lined face in fake anger and said bluntly, “Just because you’re crippled doesn’t mean that I’m going to cut you any slack.”
And with those words I had no idea what to say. Out of shock, my jaw hung open a little. I opened my mouth a little wider trying to get a few words out, but only air came out of my mouth.
“You can’t just expect everyone to stop and gawk at you,” she continued as if nothing had happened, “I can tell that you aren’t the kind of person who wants to be treated like you are a lesser person, and you hate it when people avert their eyes.”
She has truth to this I thought; but even though her dark brown eyes conveyed wisdom, all I could receive was pain and hatred.
“I see the way that people look at you and how you get a look of anger on your face,” she said.
“Yes, but was that really necessary?” Was all that stumbled out of my mouth..
“Well it appears that the only way it is going to get through your thick skull is if someone puts it bluntly.”
“You don’t know what this has done…”
“Oh yes I do,” she said while her eyes mocked me, “you were a big hot-shot swimmer and it ruined your career. Everyone in town knows your story. Now just let me say that you must understand that there are other things in life than just winning. You could…”
But before she could finish her sentence I got on my crutches and hobbled out of the shop as fast as my crutches would take me. I ignored the rain and worked my way over the old road to the muddy beach. The bottom of my crutches were getting stuck every once in a while in the soaking wet sand. Staring out over the ocean I felt jealous again of the water, but it faded much faster than it did earlier. I knew that I understood that the water did have it easy by being able to cycle back, but I could also “cycle” back to my old life if I really tried. The old woman was right; there is more to life than just winning. So glancing out at the dark, ominous, and turbulent ocean; I realized that it would be hard to remake myself, but it was possible. Therefore I forced my face away from the ocean, and crutched back into town, knowing I had just taken my last look at the ocean.
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