Involuntary Response

She hadn’t learned to swim. Childhood was more focused on fingers crossed that her lunch-lady mom hadn’t brought home the rubbery meatloaf she’d had already “eaten” that day. As a child, she never had a bike and she never got to see her favorite boyband in concert, the latter of which she regarded as a significant cruelty. Days were spent in survival mode- training her brain that moments of quiet are suspect, that anything resembling tranquility only means that malevolence is brewing. She developed a neck-tick to compliment her leg twitch. Her body thrashed to prevent her from screaming.

Now, she sits on a sticky plastic chair at an ice cream shoppe that overlooks the Mediterranean Sea and she sips on cloying sangria. A strawberries and cream order had been wolfed down not fifteen minutes prior. Dinner had been something called “pescado a la parilla,” which turned out to be six different kinds of grilled fish splayed on a platter that should have come with a serving warning.

Her hotel is nothing special, but offered her a room in Mallorca, Spain. She needed this trip, the respite. She spoke the language. Her estranged father had passed of a meth overdose (well, not passed, but was unplugged at her own order over a telephone call with a set of Kansas City doctors). She really enjoyed Spanish cuisine. The entirety of her divorce proceedings had been as abusive as the decade-long relationship she disinterred herself from over time. She wanted to do yoga by the sea. Her sister had tried to end her own life a couple months back. She enjoyed being alone when it was strictly her choice and she had lost two jobs within the past year and a half. She needs to be thousands of miles away from what had become the central theme of her life: whiplash.

When she moved into her own apartment for the first time after the separation, she anticipated liberty, joy, whatever she goddamn pleased. As the world coped with the shellshock of human plague, she came to resent the solitary confinement of the apartment she once revered as an accomplishment.

Sex was not an irregularity. She’d found a young man 6 months her junior to keep her happy for the past few months. Pleasure, however, was new and she’d hang on to this young Canadian man for as long as she could before he inevitably found a way to disappoint her. She had a penchant for unavailable men and she seemed to like her abandonment issues in full, obvious display.

A couple of years ago, she took a series of adult swimming classes. Her husband had lost his patience with how much his lessons failed to produce his desired result. She hadn't learned to swim to his satisfaction.

So now she sat. She sent her lover a picture of herself in swimsuit and looked out at the moving, gasping water. The bar in the distance played an offensive karaoke version of Cohen's (but really -Buckley's) “Hallelujah” on the loudspeaker, which felt kitsch and rude while the ocean spoke in the background. She put her things away in her oversized backpack and walked away from the strip, toward the sands. The light was completely gone from the sky, and nothing but the first few feet of ocean were visible now, moving in crashing waves while beckoning for her. The violence beautiful and familiar. She put her things down on a filthy beach chair and walked. Wearing a red swimsuit, she started to feel the cold water lapping rhythmically over her feet. The discomfort was immediate and she was alone. As she held her breath, she could feel the muscles between her eyes firmly shape the frown line she'd inherited from her mother, her grandmother. She had to move faster. So shivering, she took longer, breathless strides and finally her body submerged. In a few moments, the water would be pleasant and soothing, even in its lashing waves. Serene. She took a deep breath and her head went underwater. With no one around, she resisted herself underwater but inevitably allowed herself to float. When she poked her face above the waves, she looked toward the endlessness of the dark waters and took in the danger, the grandeur. She knew what to do with fear, she’d trained for it her whole life. In another moment, a trite version of American pop music interrupted her thoughts. This time, the sound was coming from the depths of the Sea. She looked around and there it was, a crass and gargantuan machine; a boat thumped an offbeat bass beat she could feel inside her chest. Boat turned into floating dance floor. The flashing lights glowed over a large crowd. The song ended and the ship settled into a synthetic spotlight color usurping the sea-green water of daylight. Jarring and brusque, the boat bobbled from afar. An affront to her moment of solitude, this vessel of plastic joy laughed with its horn. She couldn’t isolate herself in the Sea. Emotion won't be captured for a mere moment longer than the limits of the experience -the moment. You feel something and then without mercy, you don’t. If she could only hold the feeling of joy hostage this one time, perhaps she could learn to become familiar with it. Perhaps she’d think to trust it the next time it came around.

She would learn to swim just fine soon enough. She learned to ride a bicycle at twenty-six years old and had even ridden with skill throughout the meandering expanse of Amsterdam highways, so she had no shame about the belated accomplishment.

The truth is, her life was now very different from what she'd been trained to tolerate. Inscrutably, though, she found herself twitching more and more during moments of solitude and let’s understand that she was single, so she lived and apparently traveled alone. Her talents with catastrophe were no longer of use. Life required more than survival. Her days were no longer the cacophonous or compounding threat of violence and humiliation. Fear was vestigial.

Her flight back home was scheduled for a day from now. She would fly alone and she would be welcomed home by no one. As priority, though, she had to deal with the twitching -it was becoming excessive.