A weightless dance
The thing with swimming and my hair
The water off Nerja this morning was so calm, it blended with the sky. The waves were barely waving, and I could see the fish as I swam among them. I pulled the elastic out of my hair and swirled it in the salt water.
I have an outsized fascination with a few things, two of them being the curls in my hair and my ability to float. Both of them I discovered in the summer when I was 30 years old.
I’ve never stopped experiencing swimming as a luxury. Where I grew up, we had the brook with ankle-deep water in summer, which flowed out to a murky sound with shallow, brackish tides. Lots of play around water, but swimming was a special occasion when adults would load up a car and take us to the lake — a painfully slow process when you have no control over the vehicle or the provisions.
Back then, I could swim only with a life jacket. The refrains of my childhood were about a deep channel running through the cove by our cabin and a current that could sweep you away if you weren’t careful. A distant relative visiting one summer — she worked as a lifeguard — swam beside me and showed me I already knew how to swim.
Until the summer when I was 30, I thought swimming was a means of staying afloat. A workout at best, but essentially a survival skill. I didn’t know I could just let go and the water would hold me. I didn’t yet know what it was to be buoyant.
The summer I realized I could float without trying, I had just moved home from Germany, recovering from a work situation in which my life been controlled, both on and off the job, by a malignant religious leader. I’d walked out of the building where I both worked and lived, in a country where my stay was contingent on my employment, with just my backpack.
I’d walked away from my source of income, my housing, and the work I believed to be a vocation from God. That summer after I returned home, I think I was existing in some emotional and spiritual corridor or waiting room, a space between spaces. I was staying with my mother while I figured out my next steps, and we were spending most days at the lake.
My hair, which had been cut into an ultra-convenient, uniform-conducive pixie cut, grew out that summer while I was barely paying attention. I never cared less about how I looked than in those drying-off hours after a good swim, when my skin felt sunkissed and my body felt righteously tired. As we’d get ready to drive back from the lake, I’d check myself in the mirror and decide my hair was stylishly messy and didn’t need fixing.
Those afternoons, I’d just meander about the cove for hours, sometimes swimming, sometimes resting, my feet never touching the ground. In some parts of that cove, you don’t want your feet touching, trust me. There were two massive boulders just beyond Uncle Sidney’s cabin, their tops barely submerged. There’s a Newfoundland folk song that calls that kind of rock a sunker, as in you don’t see it till it’s sunk ‘er. We knew to avoid them when rowing, but this summer my body was in their element. I was curious but unwilling to get too familiar with their darkness.
I wasn’t calling it curls, whatever was going on with my hair. An old work acquaintance I ran into called it just-made-love hair. If I ever got back in my church uniform, I would have to get it cut and styled or at least wait until it was long enough for an updo. In fact, I never got back into my church uniform. That fall, I went to a hairdresser and asked her if there was a way to bring out the thing that was happening with my hair. She told me my hair needed some thinning, so the curls could have room to express themselves.
I’ve been feeling myself at some kind of crossroads lately, and I don’t quite know how to name it yet. Two nights ago, I went swimming as the sun was sinking and the tourist crowds were moving off the beach. I was trying to engage with God—I do that with less certainty now than I did before I was 30. I swirled and bobbed about on the waves, kind of like dancing but the dervish kind, determined to stay in the water until I could gain a sense of resolution, or at least exhaustion. I remembered the Bible story about Isaac wrestling with God for a blessing. I couldn’t remember Isaac’s name.
About six months ago, an old family friend connected with me on Facebook to ask me about petsitting. She’s some years older than me, and in that strange reconnecting conversation that happens among almost-strangers on social media, she said, “I remember you as a little girl with your dark, curly hair.” What happened between then and age 30 to make my curls stop expressing themselves, I wondered.
When the water is calm like it was this morning, I feel as if I could stroke off into the horizon. At some point a kink in a leg or foot will remind me that I don’t have any actual skill beyond floating and moving limbs haphazardly, and that’s when I’ll turn back. But I’ll linger close to shore, dancing with the water. I’ll position myself in a standing position, afloat, stretch my arms to my sides, and kick with my feet to spin, a waterborne whirligig. On my back, I’ll do a yoga position, gripping my elbows over my head and bending my knees so the soles of my feet meet, a floating reclined goddess.