I squeeze my eyes shut before the dive, even though they’re encased in my thick, blurry goggles. Perhaps my fear has to do with the near-drowning incident two summers ago, when the artificial blue waves of Sahara Sam’s Water Park held me down and I suddenly couldn't remember which way the sky was. I felt like an ingredient in a first-grade science density lab, the sluggish syrup that dribbled its way straight to the bottom, unable to rise above the buoyant vegetable oil no matter how hard I flailed about. 

It was then, while quite certain of my impending death, that I knew I would never be a swimmer.

. . .

When I was young, I was afraid of everything. Swings, slides, bicycles, overly large teddy bears, the neighbors who lived across the street, even orange juice. At seven, my parents decided to sign me up for swimming lessons (“It’ll be fun!” they said), and I was adamant that no amount of coaxing or convincing would ever persuade me to dip a single toe in the water.

Lo and behold, I ended up in the pool anyway.

It turns out, I was not only destined to be humiliated as the last kid to jump in, but I was also immediately demoted to Beginner Level One—frolicking with the toddlers. Squinting distastefully at the swimming-capped heads bobbing like apples around me, I took note that I was the only one whose feet could touch the bottom of that craggy sandpaper floor. The lesson began: butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke. There is something exceedingly shameful about being out-swum by a four year-old.

We emerged from the water and formed a crooked line, soggy prune toes curling on the edge of the speckled pool deck. The instructor clamped her mouth on the whistle, signaling me to plummet to my fate from the diving board.

My nerves coiled like snakes, and a bile-flavored lump in my throat threatened to make an appearance. One moment, weightless. The next, my face was slapped by cement-water. My treacherous mouth opened, eager to guzzle air, but chlorine-spiked water shot down instead. My arms flailed, white flags in surrender. I was a tumbling bowling pin, the eight-foot void beneath me snatching at my ankles, enviously tearing the goggles from my head, and despite the chlorine, I could taste nothing but salty-sweet panic. Then the instructor’s hands clasped onto me, and I was rescued from my watery grave.

I boasted of my second near-death in the pool to my mother, who had been watching me from a plastic folding chair across the water. I was waterlogged and exhausted, perhaps from my initial fear. But perhaps even more so from the pure exhilaration. I was so consumed by this thought that, on the drive home, I could barely pay attention to counting the windshield wipers that clicked like a metronome, and when my mother asked, “How about going again tomorrow?” I agreed without hesitation.

. . .

This is what I remember, nine years later, when I am the one holding the whistle, once again observing the colorful heads bobbing in the water. I am still taller than them, and they still remind me of apples, but I am no longer the one trembling on the diving board.

Now, I squeeze the plump fingers of the little girl who extends her hand to me. She wears a purple swimsuit with prancing ponies, and wisps of her straw-colored hair elude capture by a matching swim cap. Her other hand is detained firmly by her mouth. Her brother has only just been consoled enough to pause his firetruck wail and now perches with tear-stained lashes on the edge of the pool, solemnly waiting for his turn.

I lead the girl onto the diving board and gently untangle her hand from mine. So far, she has been a model of the plucky and lionhearted, undaunted by backstroke, breaststroke, or basic butterfly. I can’t help but compare my own first swimming lesson to hers, with my awkward, standout height and uncooperative orangutan limbs. I wonder how she’ll do on the diving board.

“Ready?” I ask her, and she nods her head, mouth still working anxiously at her thumb. Another boy, eleven or twelve by the looks of it, takes a ferocious dive into the lane to our left, and the droplets shower us like sudden summer rain. This seems to spook her, and I can see the tremble of her lower lip that threatens to break into a howl.

“I’ll be right here the whole time, I promise.”

Her lip relaxes, and now she gives an apprehensive nod. “On my whistle, then.”

“3. 2. 1.”

And when she soars, I am seven years old again, soaring with her.