The Waters Where I Learned To Swim

📅 spring 2019

〚ᴄᴡ ғᴏʀ ᴍᴇɴᴛɪᴏɴ ᴏғ ᴀʙᴜsᴇ + ᴅʀᴏᴡɴɪɴɢ, ᴀs ᴡᴇʟʟ ᴀs ғʟᴇᴇᴛɪɴɢ ʀᴇғᴇʀᴇɴᴄᴇ ᴛᴏ sᴜɪᴄɪᴅᴇ〛

Chey stood at the edge of the pool and tried to focus on the texture of the concrete beneath his toes; how its rough, pock-marked surface felt against the soles of his feet. The effort was impossible: Water sloshed into the pool’s filter and the sound pitched him towards fear again. 
“I can’t, Teagan, I can’t,” he gasped, scrambling backwards and only narrowly managing not to go fetal. He gulped at the humid, chlorine-heavy air and fought panic. Trying to hold firm to the present, he ran himself through the sequence of events that had landed him there.

His first summer “back”—because that’s what it felt like; being back; he’d told Anarchy as much that first night—he hadn’t had to worry about water. It had been a non-issue, and it could’ve stayed that way. That summer, the crew would duck into Teagan’s pool—sure, it was in the same gym Athena worked at, but they called it Teagan’s—and Chey would sit at the edge of the 3-foot section and dangle his legs in and say he didn’t want to risk his hair dye. It’d worked out just fine.
Now, two seasons on and struggling to breathe despite being completely dry, he was starting to think that that was a good plan of action for the rest of his life and he’d been irrationally cocky to think otherwise.

...But his friends had been discussing going to the beach, this year. Coney Island or Long Beach or Breezy Point; the actual ocean, not the Sound. And they were so animated; even Kohao’s snarky “The beach? To do what, flout the open container law like a bunch of fucking spring-breakers?” fell short of real sarcasm: He seemed like he might appreciate the chance to play said role, having dropped out and been too much of a social pariah to partake in that culture in school.
Athena was enthused at the idea of beach volleyball and getting everyone out together...and Chey was right there with her on that. He loved his friends, loved people, and especially people ramped up on their own excitement; he couldn’t resist vitality or the chance to seize every aspect of life with both hands, having realized just how short it had the potential to be. Coney Island in summer would be something else; iconic and crowded and perfect, and God did Chey adore the idea of being able to splash his boyfriend in the surf and exchange salt-flavoured kisses.

The issue, of course, was that water terrified him.

When he’d first run away from his foster home he’d been so broken that he’d once fled the home of a kind older woman trying to care for him when she drew him a bath. It was almost funny to look back on; he’d been in such a panic at the sound of running water that he’d forgotten he was allowed to just leave normally and had squeezed through a dog door intended for a Bichon Frise. It’d helped he was only a few months past his eleventh birthday and chronically undernourished.

Showers had been all he could manage as a teen, but even they were at the far edge of his window of tolerance for years. Therapy had helped immensely, of course, and nowadays bathtubs were no longer a terror; with a bath bomb and a couple candles, they could even flirt with enjoyability. Sort of.

It was a whole different beast for Chey when there was a threat of being in over his head. The closest he’d come to being In Water since the fucked-up baptisms in youth had been with Anarchy, clinging to his arm in those creeks out west when they were both in their early teens. Or, more recently, sitting at the edge of the shallowest end of a pool and still fighting the anxiety that fluttered in his chest with that.

Though...it wasn’t just ‘a pool.’ It was Teagan’s pool, and she seemed to be the key. Not only was she a lifeguard and swimming instructor; she was a patently sweet young woman, someone who spoke fondly about every individual in her water aerobics classes for seniors; the type to enthuse about the accomplishments her elderly students had recently made, even at a nightclub get-together with a party of punks who had no idea who Old Mr. Kaplinsky was, but were now privy to the fact he’d gone 10 whole feet without his walker this week! Isn’t that amazing?

She was the fire poppy to Athena’s wildfire spirit, and the two complemented each other perfectly, each highlighting the other’s strengths and beauties. Chey couldn’t help but admire her—and trust her. Though he got to see Teagan less than he might have liked, due mostly to friction between her and Kohao, she wasn’t the type to extend her contempt due to proximity: Chey was met with no trace of the disapproval Teagan felt for his roommate when he reached out by text and confided in her that he didn’t know how to swim. He wanted to learn, he said, but he had stuff about it and didn’t want to take a class-class because of that; so would she be willing to teach him? Privately? 
Of course, she replied, with an exclamation point react and a sunflower emoji; I’d love to!

They’d talked about it on the phone, later, setting up a time to meet and letting him briefly sum up—in the least graphic way possible—the reason he had baggage about swimming.
“That’s so awful, you suffered a lot. I see why water scares you,” she’d said softly; “I’m not a therapist, so if you have a flashback or something I can’t promise I’ll know the exact right thing to say. But I’ll be there with you and doing my best to help.”
Despite knowing to expect understanding from her, the gentleness of her voice nearly choked Chey up.
“No, yeah, that’s all I need, I think,” he’d replied; “I dealt with a lot of stuff in therapy already, don’t worry. This will probably just be...sweeping out the last cobwebs in the corners, yanno?”

Back in the present, bracing himself against the Durock wall with his limbs threatening to fail him, Chey realized he’d been wrong: Far from cobwebs in a corner, he felt he was smack dab in the center of a spider-web, an occupied one, and by how his heart was racing—? It was probably one of those fucked up giant ones from Brazil that could eat birds. 
Chey felt like he was going to pass out: The sound of water lapping at the edge of the pool had sent him spiraling, and now he was thinking about spiders. 
There had been plenty in that old house—cobwebs too; in the basement where he’d lived and up in the bathroom as well...Ghostly, dusted threads, spooling out, tangled around the brass fixtures and clawed feet of that tub... 

“Chey, hey.” Teagan appeared in front of him and placed a gentle hand on his arm. Her palm was wet and cool against his skin, dragging him back to reality. She’d climbed out of the pool to comfort him and the concrete underfoot darkened with the water pooling at their feet.
“You know it's only 3 feet deep, right?” she asked gently, her eyebrows knitted together with concern. 
“It's not that; it's knowing I'll have to go deeper,” Chey managed to choke out; “And getting in, too, and it's half my height so I can't sit in it without my head going under and just—imagining that, it’s like I can already feel the water against my chest—” The sensation strangled him as he described it and he desperately sucked in air again, no breath he took feeling like it held enough oxygen, knowing he was hyperventilating but still succumbing to the wave of panic crashing over his head.
“Whoa,” Teagan said, squeezing his arm. She let the word out low and calm, the way one might soothe a spooked horse, and it seemed to slow time down a bit; the seconds “without air” weren’t racing by Chey anymore, outpacing his lungs and heartbeat; when Teagan told him to take a ‘slow breath,’ he felt like he had the time to do it. 
Less panic. Buy more time. Another breath. 
Again.

“I’m sorry,” he said when they’d evened his breathing out; “I thought I was ready, Tea, but I’m not.”
“You’re definitely not ready to do it all immediately,” she replied; “But I feel like you’re getting too far ahead and psyching yourself out. How about for today, so that you're not anticipating anything else, we just get you to stand in the shallow end. And that's our goal. No swimming. You just get in.”
“Nothing else?” Chey asked, even though ‘getting in’ alone threatened to feel like hands around his neck; “Just get wet and that’s it?”
“You can even have the life preserver around your waist if you want,” Teagan offered. 
The fact that there was no trace of humor in her tone nearly brought tears to Chey’s eyes.

He didn’t want to have to use the life preserver, though. He’d never been one to bow to ego, but it was three feet of still water and he was just about six feet tall, standing beside a certified lifeguard, and it would have felt fucking ridiculous, despite the fact that Teagan’s offer had been genuine. He wasn’t going to do it. He clung to Teagan’s hand like it was a flotation device as she walked him down the pool stairs. 
Irrationality dogged him as water crept up to his calves; paranoid visions flashed past his mind’s eye: Misstepping on the stairs; slipping on the thin, decorative tile trim; cracking his head on the railing or the cement lip of the pool and falling face-down in the water…
“Breathe, hon, slow, okay? Let’s pause,” Teagan said. They were two steps from the bottom. Chey knew the water had to be warm—the air was so humid—but it felt like ice locking around his knees. He shivered.

The final two steps to the pool bottom brought his heart to his throat and he could almost feel the water, there, too, even though it came no higher than his upper thighs. The psychological waterline rose to the scar beneath his jaw even as he stared down, willing his eyes to believe he was still dry from the hips up. He knew he was. 

“You really are tall; look at you,” Teagan said kindly, gesturing at how much of his body remained above water; “Just a deep puddle, huh?” 
He tried to laugh but it came out too high and too fast and too close to flirting with outright hysteria: 
“Yeah, sure!”
Teagan offered him a slow blink of sympathy and beckoned him forward a step; still holding his hand in hers but increasing the distance between them.
“Come a little deeper, hon, I want you to experience having your center of gravity in the water, okay? That’ll be just up to the top of your pelvis or a bit higher, not too far.”
The proposal sounded objectively terrifying to Chey; the exact opposite of ‘okay:’ Gravity was the thing that pulled you down. Chey was no physicist but he knew that much, and ‘gravity’ + ‘down’ + the fucking water all added up to “No-no-no-no-no-no-way, Tea,” in a single, frantic exhalation that brought a concerned frown to Teagan’s lips.
She came back closer to him and pointed to a spot near his navel.
“Your center of gravity is just around here,” she said, her voice soothing and soft enough to make Chey relax, however slightly. “On balconies and places, railings are meant to be built up to a height above most people’s center of gravity, because that means they can lean on them without falling over.”
Right, gravity pulls you down, Chey thought to himself. 
“Right now, your typical center of gravity is above the waterline,” Teagan continued patiently; “Which probably makes you feel like you could ‘fall in.’ Water supports you, though, right; buoyancy? That’s why we can swim in water and not air. I want you to experience having your center of gravity in the water so that you can feel its support.”

Chey tried to take it in, but fear kept closing his throat. He wasn’t sure he understood. What if he personally had an exceptionally heavy center of gravity? Maybe most people had ones that water could hold up, but maybe his was different, and if submerged would sink like a cinder block. 
“What if it pulls me down, though?” he whispered.
“What? The water?”
“My center of gravity.”
“Oh, hon.” The corners of Teagan’s mouth twitched upward, but her eyes stayed kind and sympathetic. “Your center of gravity isn’t a...a thing, it’s more about balance. Most of your body weight is above the water now. You have a center of buoyancy, too. It’s probably about here,” she said, gesturing to Chey’s lower chest area. “Does that help? Nothing’s going to pull you in.”

Chey privately wondered if it was possible to be born without a center of buoyancy, but Teagan sounded so certain that he couldn’t bring himself to ask. He pressed his lips together and nodded, stepping forward with her and trying to think about anything other than the water he could feel pressing against his legs, lapping at his hips, and how it would feel rising, rising, rising; washing into his mouth and nose. He could hear his strained breathing as it warped into that awful rattling wheeze; the one that came with having inhaled water and being forced to listen to one's own body fight for air. A wave of life-in-third-person powerlessness hit Chey in the chest and he nearly burst into tears.

“I can't do this, Teagan, I can't,” he gasped. His voice cracked. The water was almost to where she’d indicated his ‘center of gravity’ would be.
“Yes you can, I’ve got you. One more step.”
He took it. Immediately he was racked by a full-body shudder; nausea rose from his stomach, and he figured some strangled whimper must have escaped his lips because Teagan stepped closer and rubbed his arm.
“Perfect. You’re here. You're just standing, now, ok?”

Chey managed to say “okay” in lieu of puking his guts out in fear, fighting against falling into deeper memories and forcing himself to focus on a different one, where he had also just been standing in water: Beside that railyard in Ogden, Utah, clinging to Anarchy’s arm back when he was Anthony. Chey had been scared, then, too, but had been okay. The water had been shallow and bathwater-warm with the August heat; Anarchy’s arm had been a stable support. Chey wanted to stand in the tide with him, now. Just stand. Just stand. 
He could do that.

Even from there, accomplishing that, it was an uphill battle. Therapy had helped him get to where he could talk about it all without flashing back, and he’d assumed that that counted as healing done. It turned out that talking about his past was entirely different from feeling it in his body again. Realizing how far he still had to go in healing left him feeling unsteady, but Teagan was with him every step of the way. 

He did cry the first time he got in up to his chest and shoulders: The water rippled up to just barely kiss the base of his neck and he’d lost it, dry heaving against too many memories where he’d been deprived of air, where if it hadn’t been water around his neck, it had been something else; hands, cord, cloth, a noose. Teagan stood in the pool with him, rubbing his back while he clung to the wall and sobbed.

“It’s too much to do,” he’d keened against the cement chafing his cheek; “It was too much to go through; it’s too much to get over!”
“We’re not trying to do any more today than what we’ve done,” Teagan soothed. “And you did great, hon. You did great.”

Gradually she was able to help him frame their lessons less in terms of exposure therapy—though it was—and more in terms of learning, which felt far less loaded. ‘Knowing’ water made it safer, she said, and that was relevant, because part of his fear had to be the fact that it felt like between him and water, water was the one in control at the moment—both of his emotions, and, it seemed to him, his physical safety—but learning to swim and learning his way around water would put him in control. It was comforting. So was her presence, and the fact that she always kept one hand on him, soft and stable.

When he could float on his back and get his hair wet and she deemed him ready to experiment with being underwater, it was in those loose, pressureless terms: Ready to experiment with being underwater. She brought in a snorkel and mask for him, so that he could experience his head being submerged without the breathlessness, feeling that he would benefit from the safety net. He did. It was still hard. 

At first the mask alone was a struggle. Dealing with things through talk and tapping in therapy was vastly different from processing real, whole, full sensations—and the mouthpiece he had to breathe through was an unwelcome foreign object between his teeth; the plastic that cupped his nose too much like a smothering hand. The goggles fogged up with his panicked breathing and then they were a blindfold—a blindfold, a hand, a gag, all in one, and he ripped the entire apparatus off his face no less than three times; the last being the only one where he managed not to bodily throw it. 

Teagan and the recovery work he’d already done managed to keep him from falling completely into the past, though, and one by one he retrained himself to feel the sensations as what they were in the moment. Plastic between his teeth—in 2019. Goggles cupping his face—in 2019. A rubber band behind his head, condensation on the lenses, 2019, 2019, 2019. At a pool. Learning to swim.

It did help, when he eventually did put his face in the water, to be able to breathe. The panic crashed over him like he thought it would but when he gasped for air he found it—the fact that his lungs filled with oxygen despite every sign he should be drowning almost seemed to startle his fear response into uncertainty: He could breathe? Even in the water? 
He spent a long time after that session ambiguously confused, his thoughts muted and easily forgotten, flitting out of grasp like minnows. 
“Are you okay?” Teagan asked him as they sat on the lip of the pool afterwards, and Anarchy had asked the same question that night, laying beside him in bed.
“...I think I’m recalibrating,” Chey had murmured to both of them.
A full-blown panic attack rendered passé…
He slept for 12 straight hours.

Finally, a little after that, he got to the point where he felt it was time for the real deal: To put his head underwater without the mask. Teagan was beside him, as always, with the third repetition that day that she knew it was a big thing for him and he didn’t have to do it if he wasn’t ready.
“I need to,” he said.
“You can just stick with doggy-paddling when it comes to swimming. There’s no butterfly-stroke requirement here.”
“It’s not about swimming.”
“...I know it’s not,” she murmured. “...I’m here, alright? I’ve got you. You ready?”
“I’m ready.”

He squeezed his eyes shut and dug his fingers into the lip of the pool as he pushed himself beneath the surface, the sound of lapping water and other ambient noise replaced by eerie, liquid silence as he went under. Water closed over his head and sparked the sudden, vivid sensation of an internal film reel beginning to play: Memories flickered past, projected onto the backs of his eyelids, and a feeling grew in his chest of the past being present—though without the panic or disorientation of a true flashback. He simply knew that the pressure of water against his nose (and his ears, and his lips)—was familiar. In times before it had taken a different form; been more violent, less controlled. In times before…

He could hear the indecipherable, water-warped words of Nana quoting scripture above him, but her hands weren’t on the back of his neck or gripping his hair; he met no resistance when pulling his head above the surface and found himself in a gym pool, in 2019; blinking water droplets from his eyelashes, his hair heavy and wet, the chlorine-scented air cool against his damp skin. 

He pressed his forehead to the pool wall he clung to, the coarse cement he clutched scratching the edges of his nails as he tightened his grip. His head bowed against the rough surface, he listened to the water lapping through the filter system and finally whispered to himself; 
“...Thank You Lord for Your mercy and grace; praise be unto You, may I not be led astray again.” 

“...Are you okay?” Teagan asked from beside him. The echoing acoustics of the indoor pool made her sound both closer and farther away than she was. He stared down into the water. He felt her hand on his upper arm.
“...‘Thus says the Lord God to these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live,’” he murmured. He finally raised his head to look at her, the weight of both his soaked hair and his past making it feel like an effort. “...It was always out of context, of course. Ezekiel 37:5 is about the Valley of Dry Bones, but Nana would say that when she pulled us up. Then follow with Psalm 150:6–as a command, though: ‘Let everything that has breath praise the Lord! Praise the Lord!’ And so we’d praise the Lord.”
Chey only realized he was trembling when Teagan moved her hand to rub his back, drawing awareness to the tremor in his shoulder blades.
“Well...I think you should praise yourself this time, hon,” she said quietly. “...You did it.”