Swimming upstream

Because my life tends to be a template of grays and browns, I often choose to deal in the figurative rather than the literal. With idioms come mentions of things thrilling and out of the ordinary (like lions and rolling stones), and when the closest you've come to selling your soul to anyone is succumbing to Bieber Fever, it becomes necessary to take certain liberties with language.

But this time, I have manage to transcend the curse of living only in the figurative. This time, I can, at last, use an idiom and mean it literally. This time, when I write that I swam upstream, I mean that I swam upstream. In a bathing suit. And goggles.

In an attempt to make something of a summer that has been squandered on Youtube and gummy bears, I agreed to go swimming for the first time since PE class ended a year ago. My friends and I headed to a swimming pool in a middle school nearby, they armed with towels and shampoo, I, with the flab I had accumulated over nine months of college (I had forgotten shampoo and soap). After floundering our way through several laps, we decided it was time to rest, and while the others relaxed in a warm bath, I ventured into another pool of cold water that wrapped around the spa. I found to my surprise, that the water moved counterclockwise. An invisible force propelled Spongebob-clad kids and neon colored floating boards in a gigantic circle, and I was riveted. I joined their ranks, amusing myself by kneeling on the tiled floor of the pool and riding the current, like a surfer, if surfers surfed on their knees.

Ten minutes later, the thrill of gliding around on my sore kneecaps had faded, and I decided I would become a rebel. I would swim upstream.

Maneuvering my way through the stream of swimmers so that I faced clockwise, I then began the doggy paddle of my life. The current shoved against my battered body relentlessly, and every so often, someone would barrel into me, and I would be carried several feet downstream. It was as though I alone had entered a salmon run, only for humans in swim caps, and though I had once watched a documentary on the salmon run, it was not until that moment that I began to feel a brotherhood with salmon everywhere. Only they knew this feeling of futility, of struggling against this single, unyielding force.

And though my thighs ached and the lifeguard was probably screaming "SOMEONE STOP HER," I felt strangely accomplished. As though, in my desperate thrashing, I had demonstrated the courage to not only swim against a current generated by powerful jets of chlorinated water discharged into a circular pool, but to carry myself with strength and determination even among naysayers, to paddle upstream even in life. I paddled forward, certain I had done what Elizabeth Bennet would have done had she snapped on a pair of goggles.

That is, until I paddled straight into one of the kids clinging to a floating board, elbowing him into the wall so forcefully that he burst into tears.

There is a time and place for swimming upstream. Wednesday afternoons at the Guangfu Middle School swimming pool is not one of them.