9

Swimming gives a nice feeling of freedom.

The water gurgles lazily continuously recycling.

I observe the lane, the floating dividers, white and blue at the ends, matching the rest of the pool. The red in the middle.

Following that white line against the blue background gives a sense of security. You can't go wrong.

 

Even the lights on the ceiling convey serenity. You can always find them there, waiting for you at every turn, checking that the pool attendants have everything under control.

 

Swimming in the pool is cathartic, you don't have to think about where to go.

Everything is precisely outlined, with no margin for error. Everything under control or close to it.

Yeah... because this imaginary pleasant scene is disturbed by the other people, those who, like me, try to protect their water space.

I'm not good at swimming, I can handle it but I'm lazy, so much so that I prefer watching.

 

Just as I watch my right arm come out of the water and rotate over my head, I watch it drip and then descend and dive a little further to push me ahead.

I do the same with the left but I don't have the same feelings.

I kick my legs twice and then I start again.

I watch my right arm come out of the water, lift upwards, touch the roof lights and… I'm back to forty years earlier.

 

I was a good child, diligent, alert, tall with a healthy physique. Ready to get the best from life, always smiling, even when smiling was hard for everyone else. But I was optimistic by nature.

Then everything changed and my life took a different turn.

A disease took my mother as soon as I reached adolescence. What a bad coincidence.

I think I would have suffered less if it had happened years before, when I was just a kid. Maybe not in that moment, but with the passage of time I would have come to terms with it, I would have carried on with my life and not that of others.

 

I stand there, watching the raised arm caress a beam of the ceiling, the drops of water flowing along the lines of the veins.

 

I think it was obvious for my father and brother that I would take the reins of the family; I could have left and lived my life, but I stayed, even though I knew what would be expected from me: the surrogate of a caring wife and a smiling mother, always available to everyone.

And so I did.

...

Extract from the book “We Cannot Escape from Ourselves”.