I haven’t believed in God since I went to a bible camp in 3rd grade. The only time I ever peacefully withdrew to the hold of a higher power throughout my entire life was sitting in the deep-end of a pool that was at least 11 feet deep. Air wasn’t enough to convince me that the world was large enough to be made by gargantuan hands. The sky seemed limitless and so it was a sandbox, an open-air freak occurrence, a dominion of gasses and little things. And then, there were deep-ends. I felt in this pressure against my ears and my face and my body I could sink to cement and look up at the chlorinated mosaic of the sky above me and dissolve into the infinite fractals of sunlight that I watched disappear into the current just as they were uniquely made.
I felt most relinquished to this life with metric gallons pressing on my body, pressed in between life and death, liquid and gas, and whole. I longed to be a creature of the pool depths. I longed to live among the debris of trees that floated into the pools, to join the dirt among the bits of leaves that flourish when disturbed. So that when people found me, I’d be a commodity and a treasure that a crow like me could take home and prize until it’s lost or their parents throw it away. I wasn’t fickle like the others, though. I wanted to sleep there when all the pool lights extinguished. I wanted to be visited by curious children that were brave enough to withstand the depths without complaining of achy ears or holding their nose. I wanted to be a cryptid. I’d let all the air from my body reenter the heavens above and sink down, down, back against the cement, hair pooling around me.
Finally, I could see how the world around me could maybe not echo. That when I would look at the wavering outlines of land-dwellers, their sound waves were scrambled in the fractals that tickled my eyes. No longer was this world empty and hollow. No longer were gasses infiltrating every alcove that I begged to be made whole. No longer was I at the top of a mountain.
Water would push against me, all over. It would plunder my inner ears as my eyes would spin around and around while the rest of my body hovered in place. I had swimmer’s ear so many times, but I never ever learned. I wished I could breathe it in like air so that it would take longer for my body to deflate. Air always seemed to leave too quickly, but I felt that water would let me finally be still, like sap. I felt it wasn’t too much to ask to be down at the bottom of the pool forever. I was so deeply, infinitely jealous of sand-dwellers in the ocean that I would pray to the pool god I believed in to make me a crab or a lobster so I could be at the bottom of the ocean all the time, or at least a wayward napkin that dissolved into a trillion little floating iotas that became one with the water when disturbed in the slightest. But I preferred being a crab, if that’s alright with you.
I would bring objects down with me to see if they looked any different. They always did, because nothing really belongs at the bottom of the pool, so it never failed to enchant me when staring at my dad’s sunglasses or a full water bottle that looked iridescent or a doll that I’d brought that knew too much and had to be silenced for her crimes and swim with the fishes. She knows what she did. I wished I could eat down there, and believe me, I tried. Licorice works well enough, if you can believe it. There’s only a slight chlorine taste you need to get past. Everything felt more real in the turquoise of the deep-end. I felt solid and real. I felt dissolvable and sleepy. I felt incubated.