I start at a pier, totally surrounded by the ocean. The sky is crystal blue, and there is no other sign of life but a single crow hovering above. I stretch up until I feel a burning that starts at my upper arms, flows to my hips, then to the balls of my feet. I swing my arms back and feel the sun’s warmth seep through my shirt, hit my chest, and coat my lungs. I release, then reposition myself: knees bent, left foot forward, right leg back. My breath increases as I rock my body weight from my back leg to my front, and I take one last breath, close my eyes, and lunge my body into the water.
A layer of bubbles grow and pop on my skin and in my ears as I sink into the ocean’s depths, releasing my body to the current and floating into an endless murky darkness. A moment or decade has passed when a stifled cough turns into choking and a wave of terror washes over me. I flail back to the surface and wake up in a sweat, back in my dark room where I hear the droning of an air purifier and the wind swinging the magnetic screen into the back door.
I turn to my side and find my breath until I see my mother and my nephew. I hear my dad singing, I feel Darrien’s touch. Ryan’s gaze. Tunde’s laugh. A bright day. A hotel towering over me.
My parents never taught me to swim so I’m the only third grader on the shallow end. The kindergarteners and first graders play marco polo while I walk from one end of the pool to the next, again and again, going under every so often to see how long I can hold my breath. My friends who are in middle school had been playing chicken but now they are finally in a circle talking so I speed over to the divider. I laugh when they laugh and pretend I understand what AIM is. We start playing truth or dare and someone dares all the girls to race. Lost in the moment, I cross the divider into the deep end, grasping the pool’s ledge. For the first time in my life, my feet can’t reach the bottom and, overcome with the ecstasy of weightlessness, I let go of the ledge. I immediately sink, a strange force pulling me further and further to the bottom until a hand reaches out - searching. It grabs me and plops me on the cement. My teeth clatter, my eyes sting, my throat burns. I stare into the sky until the skyscrapers’ silhouette and tree canopies sear into my mind.
The waves crash against the rocks, almost to the tip where Kat and I are sitting. We took a road trip from Los Angeles to Cayucos for spring break, and on our first night we walked to the beach, found the highest point we could, and smoked a joint. We were the only black freshman girls in our dorm and now we are sophomores and running out of things to say to each other. The currents fill the silences and muffle our voices, while the image of the ocean swallowing me whole imprints itself in my mind. But Kat is fearless and I want to keep up with her. So I let my stomach summersault until the nausea is lost in her breath as our faces draw nearer. The crashing grows into a roar and her curls are tangled in my hands. The waves brush against our toes, each touch recovering years of lost movement, lost voices, and uncertain vision.
For my 21st birthday I took a bus then a ferry from Poughkeepsie to Peaks Island and on my first morning there, I decided to visit the shore. As I clumsily climb the rocks to be closer to the water, my camera that I just repaired the night before slips out of my hands, bounces off a rock and into the ocean. Afraid I would fall in, I find a long stick and fish it out. No amount of pressing the shutter turns it back on, so I sit with my thoughts and the crashing waves. In this silence all my senses flood back to me, and I’m filled with a knowing of the water - a knowing that there are thousands of oceans, immeasurable and too mighty to be contained, and each droplet merges into a constant fluidity that takes the world and its memories with it. It takes happiness and pain, sorrow and troubles. It takes ambivalence, and it takes joy. It remembers death and it remembers birth. It knows and it releases and it suffocates. It is silent and then it roars.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve accepted the fact that I can’t swim. I’m content with sitting and watching and dreaming. In my dreams I’m always falling into the water, writhing and flailing until I’m just deep enough for the waves to pull and shake my limbs, breathing life into every inch of my skin. It engulfs me until I’m a microscopic entity basking in the weightlessness of floating, and searching for the voice of eternity.
Nneoma Njoku
Nneoma Njoku is a researcher and designer whose work interrogates what’s below, behind, and between knowing, and who decides what counts as knowledge in the first place. She makes artist’s books that encourage readers to re-sense the past and present as an enigmatic space containing multiple, overlapping realities. She received her BA in Philosophy from Vassar College and is currently pursuing an MFA degree in Graphic Design at Virginia Commonwealth University. This summer she will be the Book Artist in Residence at VCU Library’s Special Collections and Archives.