The Swimmers

by Julie Otsuka

“Up there,” she says, “I’m just another little old lady. But down here, at the pool, I’m myself.”

down below, at the pool, we are only one of three things: fast-lane people, medium-lane people or the slow.

the shock of the water—there is nothing like it on land. The cool clear liquid flowing over every inch of your skin. The temporary reprieve from gravity. The miracle of your own buoyancy as you glide, unhindered, across the glossy blue surface of the pool. It’s just like flying. The pure pleasure of being in motion.

And if you swim for long enough you no longer know where your own body ends and the water begins and there is no boundary between you and the world. It’s nirvana.

And what we lack in horizon and sky we make up for in tranquility, for one of the best things about the pool is the brief respite it offers us from the noisy world above: the hedge trimmers, the weed whackers, the horn honkers, the nose blowers, the throat clearers, the page rustlers, the incessant music that is playing wherever you go—at

others of us, however, feel strangely relieved. The terrible thing we have been waiting for has finally happened. A weight has been lifted. A shadow has passed. The uncertainty is over. This is it. The end. No more fun for us. And now we can move on.

She remembers that she is forgetting. She remembers less and less every day.

You should have lived (but what did you do instead? You played it safe and stayed in your lane).

“Next year,” you kept saying to yourself. And now—Surprise!—next year is here.

you always thought she would live forever. She never got sick. She never complained. She never broke a single bone. She was, for as long as you can remember, as “strong as an ox.”