Submergence

There’s this fleeting sensation when you first slip into the pool for a pre-dawn swim that swirls together all sorts of disparate feelings. The heavy-lidded reluctance to move so early in the morning, the hesitant regret to get in the water, the chill embedded in your skin from the air outside. And also the heavy chlorinated humidity of the pool room, the initial jolt of weightlessness, the submersion that somehow crackles awake all your somnolent muscles. The tipping point between “why am I doing this” to “let’s go.” The moment is an exhalation. It reminds me every time that the whole endeavor is worth it.

In those winter days at the beginning of 2020, my alarm went off at 6am when everything outside was pitch black and quiet. I’d give myself 15 minutes or so to get out of bed, dress, grab my bag and leave the house before cutting across Kadikoy to my friends’ place in Acibadem. Garbage trucks rumbled down quiet streets, bleary well-dressed workers waited for their service buses, occasionally an elusive Istanbul hedgehog would skitter off the sidewalks. By 6:45, still in darkness, we would drive to a nondescript Kadikoy municipality building. By 7am, I was in the pool. 

It seemed like a dream even at the time, probably because when I got out of the pool at 7:50am the sun had still barely started to rise even by mid-March. I looked forward to the warmer months, when my morning swims would be in sunshine, instead of in the cocooning darkness of a wee-small-hour sky. I went swimming at my 7am slot as usual on Thursday, March 12. By noon, they had temporarily shut down the pool because of Covid. As of today, it has still not re-opened.

Every time I sit down to write about the pandemic, I end up writing about swimming.  It’s something I still miss a year on with my whole body, a physical manifestation for me of everything that has so dramatically changed, of all that was lost. 7am lap swimming at the Kadikoy Belediye pool was only part of my life for maybe a month and a half, from the beginning of February through You Know When, but somehow it has come to seem bigger than those handful of weeks. 

The act of swimming is a repetitive act of resilience, of using your body to move forward and keep your head above the water. This year took regular lap swimming away from me, but it’s given me plenty of practice with repetitive acts of resilience. 

I still remember sharply those early days, when every plan melted away, and the late spring days, when the lockdowns slowly sapped my spirit until I spent days curled up on my couch in crippling boredom, and the early summer days, when even the sunshine couldn’t lighten the heaviness in my shoulders. We’ve survived something and we’re still surviving it, even if the act of surviving is so second-nature after a year that we barely feel it. But it’s there, weighing us down in this pandemic reality. 

Over the summer, when the numbers in Turkey appeared low and we were no longer under lockdown, I fled to the coast with a friend in a rented car, desperate to feel that submergence, that buoyancy. In Ekincik, I’d sneak out early before my friend was awake to swim laps in the Mediterranean bay, choosing arbitrary endpoints on the beach to mark my lap length. The water was turbulent, the pitch of the waves unpredictable, with undulating surfaces and gentle if persistent currents. I was pleased with myself for making the effort, but I could never surrender to the routine the way I could in the pool. It was a poor substitute for the rhythm of swimming in controlled water. What used to be a time to let my thoughts marinate, like a waking REM cycle, instead required hyper-awareness of the treacherous world around me. Swimming in the sea is just stranger than swimming in a chlorinated pool, with the salinated water gently lifting the body and the thick metallic taste of salt coating my tongue. I always ended thirsty.

In California, during the month I spent in my parents’ house (and after the half-month I spent in quarantine), my sister and I could swim in Walnut Creek’s municipal pool, a semi-heated outdoor arrangement under autumnal trees. We had to register exactly one week to the minute before the swim slot we wanted, and we’d both set alarms and wait alert at our computers to quickly snag the spot before the limited spaces filled up. It meant we could never swim at the same time week to week, making the jaggedy adjustment to a new routine every seven days. The first time I swam, after recovering from Covid and not swimming in a lap pool for nearly nine months, it was hard. Lap swimming rewards routine, and I had to break in my body again, rewire my muscles for an hour of crawl, one hand over the other. One, two, three, breathe. One, two, three, breathe. When our time slot finished, we had to scurry out directly to the parking lot with wet hair to obey the pool’s strict Covid guidelines. And then we’d drive home, cold and dripping, happy with this semblance of regular life, even if it wasn’t regular at all. 

In the water, buoyancy cancels out gravity; in the pandemic, I strive to float to supersede the weight of the world. I’ve been as adaptable as anyone else, finding ways to live my life and stay relatively happy and healthy even as the world shudders and lurches into its new form. But I feel the absence of the before-times in my muscles, in the lack of lap swimming. Or sometimes, I feel it in the surreality of the swimming itself, as the California sky breaks open with winter rain and I continue my strokes anyway, grateful for these small scraps of normalcy, of exercise, of strength. Grateful that, for at least one hour, I can pretend that there is no pandemic. There is only my body, and the water, and motion. When I return to Istanbul, the absence of that feeling is even stronger.

Swimming is all about the conservation of momentum: the momentum you give your body going forward equals the momentum you give the water, pulling backward. And this way, you propel yourself onward, balancing the push and the pull, utilizing momentum to move. Existing in this last year has been just like that, a constant conservation of momentum. And it all keeps moving forward. And I keep reminding myself to breathe. One, two, three, breathe.

I don’t know what the future looks like, how the trickling vaccinations will shift reality, how returning to a now-outdated “normal” will feel. But I am okay with not knowing, because if I’ve learned anything at all since mid-March 2020, it’s that we can’t know, the future is by its nature unknowable. All we can do is practice our repetitive acts of resilience, balance our buoyancy with the world’s gravity, and breathe. I work every day to accept the moment I am in now, to be present.

Yet sometimes, my brain still snaps awake at 6am in the darkness of Istanbul’s winter, and before I center myself in this place and this time, I remember that first hush underwater. I smell the sharp scent of chlorine. And for a second, I am floating, again, weightless and buoyant, in the pool.