Halfway Up - April 28 2025

 

Halfway Up

April 28 2025

I wasn’t a floater.

I known we’re mostly water,

but don't we have air keeping us up

enough adiposity?

After all, even the least of us

have our life-giving lungs.

Yet I somehow defied natural law

and went straight down.

Was Archimedes wrong?

Am I composed of different stuff?

The fat girl

bobbing like a whale,

frolicked

with effortless buoyancy.

Even the skinny kids held their own;

mostly submerged,

but you could see their noses poking up

toes

breaking the surface

and wiggling happily away.

I felt like a bottom feeder

in the beginner class

learning to swim.

Which thankfully, I eventually did;

if badly

then at least enthusiastically

up and down the lane.

But sinking out of sight

and not being like the others

must have been a portent

for the rest of my life;

hard

to keep my head above water,

a struggle

just keeping up,

feeling different

and fitting out more than in.

Is neutral buoyancy

too much to ask?

A pelagic mammal, finally at rest;

finding my level

halfway down

holding my breath.

If I let out all my air, I do sink. I flatter myself it’s more muscle than fat. But still, shouldn’t I be lighter than water no matter what body type?

I actually can’t remember learning to swim. Although I do remember some instances of panic. It had to be an advantage to have more fat, more natural buoyancy, the first time you’re thrown into the deep end. So, do fat kids eventually become better swimmers?

The truest part of this story is the penultimate stanza. (Swimming badly but enthusiastically is also true!) I guess most adolescents feel “different”. But for some of us, that doesn’t go away. And invisibility can be either a welcome disguise, a fact of life you accept, or something to break out of — like all those shallow young people today who aspire to celebrity, not for anything they’ve accomplished, but as a thing in itself.

The title came to me as the obvious complement to the ending, and the diametric symmetry illuminates the choice the writer makes. Like the half full or half empty glass, it depends; and here, he clearly makes the more negative choice.