This is an assignment I had in English. Hope you like it!
There’s Death in the Water
I think it’s funny how something so innocent can in an instant become deadly, even something as harmless as a pool of water. We think we control it. Trapping it inside concrete or plastic and then splashing it around as if we somehow own it. I know better. Water can be submissive but if given the chance it could kill a grown man in minutes.
It was a hard lesson I learned long ago when I was little. The sky was a beautiful blue and warm and my sisters and my cousins and I found escape from the heat in my best friend’s pool. It was the biggest pool I’d ever seen in a backyard, over 12 feet in a diameter with a slick plastic bottom that slopped sharply down to six feet deep. Katie and I couldn’t swim yet, but that didn’t matter because half of the pool was less than four feet deep. The water was cool and soft and we would dive under it to catch up the bright plastic pieces of buried treasure. Seeing my family laugh and play in the deep end my friend and I decided to explore and see how far out we could really go. Looking back it was a stupid plan, but reason seems to fail when bravery is called for to stretch our mortal limitations.
We found out that if you gripped the sides of the pool you could go all the way around it and if we stretched our toes way far down we could stand on the inch of slick plastic ledge that stood out from the wall. We felt like fearless explorers climbing the icy heights of Mt. Everest as we circled the pool several times.
My friend grew tired of the game long before I did and she went back to diving for treasure in what I now considered the “kiddy-end.” I wanted to be out there in the deeper end with my family, but the closest I could get to them was the wall. The water soared and called to me like a siren’s song to come and play and bask in its glittering cascade. I wanted to join their splashing games. After all I couldn’t be hurt. Such was my thinking as I made my way out to the deeper end. I stopped and gripped the pool bottom hard with my toes, letting go of the wall I stretched my arms out to splash my sister. My toes slipped suddenly out from under me and I was down, down in the sparkling depths of the pool water.
I shut my eyes and mouth tight. It was quiet. I couldn’t breathe. I knew I was floating somewhere between the air and the bottom unable to touch either. I wanted to panic, I wanted to scream! There was a fire in my chest that was growing bigger by the second. Suddenly something inside me stirred; some sort of quiet calm that raised its head and said logically, “Well, you’re going to have to breathe sometime. Now how are you going to do it? There is air above you how will you get there?” I opened my eyes and I saw the legs of my family kicking around in the water. I remembered the diving for treasure game. Sometimes Katie and I would brace our feet on the bottom before pushing up hard to see how high we could jump into the air. Sometime as graceful dolphins, other times as beautiful mermaids, the creatures that ruled the waters and the sea as humans never could. In order to survive, I’d have to become a dolphin.
I moved my arms above my head and I sunk down until I could feel the slick rubber bottom with my feet then I kicked up hard. My head broke the surface and I was able to grab a big swallow before sinking back down. I could feel that stirring calm growing even stronger. It pushed against my rising panic, forcing me to keep my mouth shut and to think. “You know how get air.” It said, “Now you have all the time in the world. Think. How are you going to get out of the pool?”
“I’ll yell for help!” I thought. I pushed hard against the pool floor trying to make this the biggest jump of my life, but I was back down in the water without having had time to make so much as a squeak. I tried at least three more times before realizing I wasn’t going to get any help from my noisy inattentive family. I tried walking up the steep slope of the pool to safety. Bouncing up and down through the water like some strange slow moving sea rabbit. But the slick floor would just slip me back down into the deep end. I began to pray at that point. I was getting tired and it was getting harder and harder to push myself up and out of the water. If there was any time for God to rescue me it would have to be soon. I remembered my mother, quietly but very firmly always saying, “Now, don’t go to the deep end or you’ll drown.” “Honey, don’t go far without a grownup or you’ll drown.” Well, I was already in the deep end and I was beginning to wish that moms were more forthcoming with how to get out of trouble instead of just how to avoid it.
I was beginning to think water had won. That I would just lie on the bottom of Katie’s pool until someone would notice my cold corpse and finally pulled it out. The fire that had fueled my determination to survive was dimming; the voice that had kept me calm was silent. I broke out of the water for what I thought was one of the last times. Through my bleary water stained eyes I could see an angel coming towards me. It was my sister, Diantha, she was swimming in my direction. “Oh please let her see me!” I started jumping higher and higher and watched hoping that she would just notice me drowning in this stupidly designed pool. Finally, she swam close to where I was and I grabbed her, pulling myself up onto her back and gasping for blessed sweet air taken in slow deep breaths. As soon as I could talk I had her take me to the side where I could tumble out and continue to breathe the wonderful muggy air of that summer day, just grateful to be alive!
No one had even notice my battle with death that day. My sisters tried to deny it when I told my mom that I had nearly drowned. They claimed that I had been playing safely with Katie the whole time. Diantha thought that I had somehow jumped from the shallow end to grab her. I think my tears and descriptions convinced my mother. It didn’t matter. Nothing could change the fact that I’d nearly drowned and not one of them had even noticed. Years later when I asked Diantha about it she didn’t even remember the incident, though she remembered many other fond memories of our childhood. It’s hard to be mad at an angel who forgets saving you from drowning. Still, water had left its scar. I know that death waits in the water. One moment of panic, one second where your guard is down then the cooling embrace that saves us from the burning sun will become a cage of icy of choking silence. The water will hold you in a state of limbo with no way to escape its massive power. I had been lucky.
A bit long for a blog post, but that's still only part of the essay. I thought it was good, and my class certainly enjoyed the tension as much as they enjoyed ripping it to pieces in the discussion panel. I think that's the most fun I've had talking about writing in my life.
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