There is a story my mother likes to tell: me, as a toddler, playing in a fountain after all the other children had run back to their parents. My mother asks me if I want to come out. “No!” I shout, “I like it! I like it!” even as my lips turn blue.
I love my body best when I am in the sea.
The cold of it shocks my cells into crystalline sharpness. It creeps into every part of me. I am laughing, gasping, making noises. I take it slow – let the water rise an inch or so at a time, let my legs get used to the chill before I subject my torso to its grasp. Of course, the waves have other ideas – and once I am deeper in, each pounding, churning wave is breaking against my scalp, sending me off-balance, tumbling through the surf, and I must hold my breath until it’s done.
Later, I will talk excitedly about horror and comedy, and how similar the two modes are – how it’s all about timing and intensity. Timing: if I kick off the sand at exactly the right time, the wave will carry me with it. I will surge towards the shoreline like the figurehead of a ship, fast and powerful and free. Intensity: Sometimes, even if I get the timing right, the wave will be too tall for me to crest and it will pummel me beneath the water’s surface, send my hair over my eyes, rush up my nose, leave me gasping and disoriented and a little too aware of what it might feel like to drown.
Silly, really. I am never so far out that I cannot touch the ground. Once I am in up to my neck, the waves are gentler. The sea no longer tries to expel me. I drift above each swell, lifting my face to keep my airways clear, catching pale flashes of seagull wings above me. It is at this point that I scarcely want to swim at all. My body is almost entirely numb – moving my arms or legs too much causes a strange jangling sensation to shoot up and along my nervous system, but I am too content to worry about that.
I am in raptures. I begin to repeat ‘glorious, glorious, glorious’ under my breath, when I am not laughing or humming or diving beneath the waves. A friend once told me that they had found the secret to happines, and it was swimming in the river. They weren’t wrong, but nothing compares to the sea.
A gaggle of surfers have joined me, enveloped by their wetsuits. I am protected by the cold only by my swimming costume, and feeling remarkably smug about this. One of the surfers – farther out than the rest, and not too far from me – is whooping and cheering and suddenly falls off his board. I do not have the patience to be a surfer; so little time surfing, so much bobbing around. Still, I understand them – I, too, have braved the cold to be beaten by the waves.
When I stagger out after letting the waves return me to the shore, I cannot feel my legs. I stagger up the beach to where my partner waits, doing my best to ignore the people giving me ‘in March? Is she mental?’ stares. My entire body is singing as the bloodflow slowly returns. I am the plucked string of a harp, with one high and clear note reverberating through my every cell.