Water Baby

I am falling, or maybe flying. I have met the Under Toad, and he is me.

I am three years old, maybe four. Possibly only two. Swinging my chubby feet in the warm chlorinated water. Mom sits in a lounge chair, while thin strips of plastic support and mark her. Dad is off somewhere, doing whatever it is that Deacons of Methodist Churches do on these retreats. My brother, surely no more than fifteen, is diving off the board, playing to the instincts of the pretty young daughters of other Methodist Deacons.

I do not remember why I go in. Whether I simply kicked the water until the slippery rubber drew me, or whether the prettiness of the sun dancing on the impossible blue was more than I can resist. Regardless, in an instant, I am there, under that water, looking up. Looking into the eye of the universe.

The sun-dappled yellow sparkles are made hazy and white by foam and chlorine. The warter is turquoise and sky blue. Floating in it, moving in it, an arm I recognized as my own. Made indistinct by chemicals, but flying, not flailing. No sense of danger, no sense of pain, just the awe of an innocent, in a world where everything is new, and who still remembers the face of god.

Then I draw a breath, and mortality fills my lungs. That first angry, frightened gasp of air when stolen from my mother’s belly. Taken from that safe place I knew into all that was unfamiliar. It is startling every bit as much as painful. It has nothing to do with the water I am under, with the blue and white dancing swirls. I take another breath, and begin to sink.

The third breath is no longer painful, as if my young body still secretly longed for that womb. My relief is immediate, because the colors are so pretty, and I am flying, falling, sinking, surrendering to the sparkle of stardust from which I came. Hurting only for that indescribable moment when untold sparkles of stardust emerged from whatever was before, making everything in an instant.

I am closer, closer. The water is darker, is inside me. I am the water. I am the dappled blue and yellow. The bliss and joy would be unendurable, had I knowledge of true pain, of good and evil.

Then chaos, as a boy’s arm, my brother’s pulls at me and grabs me around the waist. I am indignant, and try to recall how to use those little arms, to get back to the middle of it all, to the sparkles and the infinite. A child trying to fight and flail, But the teenager’s arms have me firm, and I am dragged from that perfection to the other side, where there is rough concrete, splashes, shouts. Anguish leaps from my mother like sizzling water leaps from burning oil.

The rest is incidental. My lungs are evacuated, my body and spirit conjoined. Trip to a hospital, medicine to prevent infection, and eventually a return home, with a proud sibling, a traumatized mother, and the distant, solid, trembling rock of my father. Back to stern lectures and warnings. To a place where we cannot dare fall, cannot dare fly. Where preserving what we are is paramount. This world, this life. More than anything, we are taught to fear that blue and white perfection, dread the inevitable return to that spark. We are taught to believe that something eternal and wondrous lies on the other side, but also taught to shrink from it with all our might, as it is darkness and the end of all we know.

I am in the hospital, waiting for the IV infusion of my eighth different drug so far in the treatment for my PCP. I can get to the bathroom on my own, sometimes without coughing my donkey bray, without gasping for breath. I can sleep for a couple of hours at a time, mainly because I am so very tired. I sip water from a Styrofoam cup, and remember again to be grateful to Richard and Adam, the two important men in my life, whose relationship I can’t sully with terms like “friend.” It hurts them so badly to see me sick. Adam and I had harsh words directly before I went to the hospital, and we need to spend some time alone together to forgive each other and bond a little more, to do our unique, familiar dance.

I sleep fitfully, anxious, interrupted by blood draws and IV medications and food served far too late in the morning, far too early at night. I sip my water, I sometimes read my book. I chat on the phone with anyone who will talk. I tell my mom I am doing fine, and listen to her struggle not to cry. She is old, and weaker than she’d like to be. Like that day forty years ago, she is unable to reach me from where she sits, and I can almost taste her frustration.

I don’t know how long I will be here, or what will happen. Time seems to have stopped for me, or sped up. I am removed from it, here. Bobbing below and above the surface of the linear. I wish I was at home. I wish I was kissing an enthusiastic ferret, or feeling Richard’s feet against my legs as we recline on the futon, watching British comedy and cheesy science fiction. I miss Adam’s ascerbic comments about the reality fashion show program, and making him laugh with my own.

Mostly I miss the blue and white water. Always in motion, always changing, consistent always only in that.

I do not know how much flailing I am doing, or flying, or falling. But this drowning, like love, seems far less beautiful than the first time. Knowledge of pain, I believe, is the real expulsion from Eden. It defines us, sometimes overtakes and petrifies us, dictates so much of who we are and what we do.

Green-tinted Avelox runs into my arm. The monitor pumps like the heartbeat of a sick old man. Breakfast is in an hour. News is on television. I am not a child, and this is not a hotel pool.

But it feels almost exactly the same.