When I was fourteen years old, I discovered that swimming pools are a metaphor for love. The source of my discovery was Macdonald Hall: Go Jump in the Pool! by Canadian writer Gordon Korman. In a story about boarding schools and friendship and refusing to let go, the crux of the drama is the nonexistence of a swimming pool; its absence threatens the friendship between teenagers Bruno and Boots. Their school has a swim team but no pool—a paradox if you’ve ever heard one—and Boots’ parents want him to go somewhere where athletics are less complicated. Where swimming pools are tangible things, and not metaphors. If Bruno builds a swimming pool, Boots can stay. If he doesn’t, Boots must leave. The swimming pool is built. Boots stays. Bruno, as it turns out, cannot swim. Maybe the story isn’t really about the pool, but it’s not really about anything else, either. It is love, through and through.
There is something intimate in the rituals of a public swimming pool. For a fixed fee you can strip yourself down to the barest of modesties, shower in a room full of strangers, tie the key to your belongings around your wrist, and work it out in a vat of other people’s piss and sweat and chemically-treated chlorinated water. You are surrounded by voyeurs: the lifeguards, the other swimmers, your own reflection warped across the surface of the tiles. Strangers have seen parts of me that I purposefully conceal from my own mother. In the aftermath, tired and damp and stinking, you can crowd around a mirror and a poorly-working hairdryer and pretend as though you never took off the mask in the first place. It isn’t like swimming in the sea, where the ocean itself is a pleasant enough distraction. It isn’t like swimming at a hotel, where the pool is secondary to the sun, the sky, the book in your hand that you keep telling yourself you’ll finish before the flight home. The public swimming pool is a place of intense vulnerability: there is nowhere to hide. You are here, and you are almost naked, and you are swimming, round and round the same finite space. What else can you do. When it comes down to it, what else, really, is love.
When my last relationship ended, I fixated on the idea of swimming for reasons that confused my friends and that I myself couldn’t quite understand. I had swum plenty as a child, but puberty and poor fitness made me quit the habit. Swimming is expensive; before even paying the fee to enter, you must own a costume, and preferably a pair of goggles—must have had the prerequisite months or years of swimming lessons to ensure you don’t drown yourself in the process. Other suggestions were thrown at me. Badminton. Long walks. Theatre. Poetry societies, and summer plays, and design committees, and essay competitions. I couldn’t bear the thought of any of them. In my mind’s eye, whenever I thought of trying to cope with my breakup, I thought of swimming pools. I had to go swim, even if I couldn’t explain why. I spent hours consulting timetables and sports shops and imagining myself in that water. So, finally, I went.
It was a thirty-five minute walk and I wore the wrong shoes, but when I walked out of the changing room, swimming cap pinching my forehead, goggles hanging uselessly around my neck, I felt at peace for the first time in days. There was nobody there who knew me: not my ex, who I had been guiltily avoiding, not our mutual friends, whom I still didn’t know how to respond to, not any of my various Tinder matches or passing acquaintances or friends who I hadn’t quite been able to confide in yet. This was a good decision, I later told my two best friends—who had been as bemused by my newfound swimming obsession as anyone else, but agreed to wait for me while I explored this brave new frontier. The pool was almost as wide as it was long, and the slow lane was empty. When I climbed in, hesitant around the steps, it was cool but not cold. For the first time, I understood why baptism has to be done in water. I stepped into that pool and imagined that I was starting a new life. Nobody expects you to talk in a swimming pool; the chlorine gets up your nose. You just have to focus on staying afloat. I swam laps in the slow lane and none of it mattered; I hovered in the shallow end, eyes stinging, and I felt like a real person. I’ll tell you a secret: like Bruno, I can’t really swim. Like Boots, I wanted to anyway. When the water rushed into my ears, I let it deaden me to the outside world, and I was glad.
Cee Ellis-Stoneman (they/them) is a current English student at Robinson College, Cambridge, and recently received their first publication in Partially Shy. In their free time they enjoy over-analysing children’s literature, red wine, and, of course, swimming.