This photo is out of context. I just wanted the underwater imagery. I mean, c'mon, look at all that hair! Sheesh.
When I was a kid, I was kind of obsessed with the bottom of the pool. I was a water-mad little bastard from as far back as I can remember--pleasantly humiliating speedo-clad childhood photos still stand as proof. I would swim in anything, dive off anything, splash through anything. I think I got a lot of skin ailments and rashes and stuff because of that tendency, but I wouldn't change a thing.
The bottom of the pool: man, that was the shit. I don't remember the first time I got a sense of being in deep water, but it was an enormous sensation. The weight of the water: fascinating.
We used to go swimming in the Gunpowder River downstream from Prettyboy Dam. The swimming hole had a ridge of rocks underwater, along the line of a long-fallen-in bridge. And the backed-up water hitting those rocks may have been my first experience of heavy space. It was calm enough that I could splash there as a four or five year old or whatever, but the water was high enough that I could kind of dunk myself and grab at the rocky bottom or just float there. Farther under the surface than a bathtub, the water was actually a thing, a medium to travel through, an animal walking around you.
And when I got a little older and actually went to pools, I immediately spent as much time as I could on the bottom. Once I had the skills to dive into the deep end, pull myself along the invisible ropes of water, and fight the air in my lungs trying to bring me back up, I just stayed there.
Hook a finger into the drain grate and languish on the bottom. Feel your ears crushing, squeaking. Feel the pressure crowd your sinuses, leaving little slithery sensations above your teeth, whispering amongst the tissues that maybe something was about to rupture.
Rutpure. God, what a fantastic, terrifying word for a nine-year-old. I was a pirate corpse hero ghost, wrapped in the sea's humongous thundering thoughts.
The bottom of the pool, the deep water: these were the places where you could go no further. That was what drew me. You knew from the pressure and the suffused thickness of the alien surroundings; you knew from everything tactile, that you were at a point you couldn't undercut. There was no beyond.
You were at the bottom of the pool.
No further down. No deeper. No freedom or safety to wiggle or flounce. It was just somehow really, really...serious.
I guess at a young enough age you have the joyous lightness and luck--for a while, anyway--to need something immensely structural, concrete, and physical to remind you that the world has limits, and danger, and consequence.
What a blissful gift: to misunderstand consequence to such an extent that slightly terrifying proof of it was actually fun. Alluring. Comforting.
I sure as shit didn't appreciate it when I had it. Beloved, breath-held dumbass; I just knew it felt powerful down there. Powerful because I was powerless.
The bottom of the pool, man. Wow.
Sigh.
I'm trying really hard to keep the light of those memories right now.
Because I'm scuttling across the floors of silent seas again.
And for the first time, and with a neck-snappingly different perspective, I hate it.
The bottom of the pool now is this reset button of chemo. This physical jail of repetitive weakness. This slack cage of skin I can't slough or rebuild.
Yet.
I get it, and I understand the doomed tone I am taking here, and I am not hurling myself over any cliffs. I am stumbling about a darkened stage with trite hand slapped against cliche forehead, bemoaning and declaiming and pissing and whingeing.
I get that. I know the physical and medical truths in front of me: I am doing well, progressing through the treatment, and just insanely insanely insanely antsy to get the maintenance phase started FOR CHRIST'S SAKE!
We are out of the hospital, safely home, going back into the clinic tomorrow for what so far seems like regular--boring even--bloodwork and maybe fluid top-off. The fever never came back, they kept an eye on me for a couple days, and then we were sent home. I have tried and tried to be more careful, eat less carrion, body-surf fewer steroid waves.
Mom and Jim were up for a visit, and the Ravens victory over the Chiefs, and it was good.
N and I attended a Pen American Center event the other night, as she is a new member of that fine institution: we were actually in Brooklyn, on purpose, which is in and of itself astonishing and possibly a good sign.
To quote Dave Mustaine of Megadeath:
"So far, so good, so what?"
This is what the therapist meant about maintenance being its own cruel beast and battle. I am so angry that every time I come home from the hospital I am back to where I was physically. Any exercise, any laps, and days out in the air where I felt like maybe I could take two steps at a time or, gulp, god forbid, trot across the street: it is all devoured by the toxins; killed by the cure.
And I have this tingling horizon of maintenance wherein the possibility--distinct and real--of slowly progressing, lifting off the bottom of the goddamn pool, exists.
It is maddening to not see or feel or sense that first inch of liftoff. Because it hasn't happened yet.
I got popped with the last Vincristine while we were in last week. I'm freshly chemoed, like a goose-bumped knave toddler just out of the bath and scrubbed clean, ready and new to the world. Starting with a clean slate.
The bottom of the goddamn pool.
It'll come. By this time tomorrow I will have a much better idea where I am in the recovery, which is the last thing before the start of maintenance: get over the last poison, then start being a recovering person--on less poison, able to move forward with less fear of backsliding, or regression, or relapse. N's near-perfect record-keeping shows us where my numbers likely are, and we know that all I have to do right now is not be a friggin' idiot and let the chemo pass through, and we'll be on our way in the right direction.
And it isn't cancer: I am not scared right now of cancer (which, if I were not so self-consumed and Narcissistically overwrought, would strike me as miraculous). It is a pure and simple physicality. Just the ability to feel like, if I had to--if my wife were threatened or some stroller were rolling into the crosswalk--I could perform as needed, and not just slump, or pass out, or otherhow fail.
It's stupid, I know. It is the next challenge, and I will rise to it and beat it like the others, only maybe with something learned from past travails. I will get my head around it. Get my hands around it, and wring it's friggin' little neck.
But just now--freshly weak and watching the unexpected and joyous facial hair growth of two weeks ago spill into my hot chocolate beneath the latest wave of pharmaceutical yumminess--I just feel futile, like a fat baby waving sausage arms at flies above his basinette.
Simple and human: you want something really badly. And you can't have it. Not yet, anyway.
'Almost, at times, the Fool.'
On the bottom of the goddamn pool.
