Swim at Dawn

In August I took a holiday to Santorini and spent a great deal of my time sea swimming. On the last morning, I got up early enough to see, and swim with the dawn. That morning I was neither very sad nor very happy, but here’s a piece I have written in response to the swim.

You wait for the dawn. You watch the darkness, watch where you’re sure the horizon should be, while shadows which exist only inside you swim before your eyes. Then a hint, a slow leach, almost fearful, spreads before you as day begins to insinuate itself into the darkness that has concealed you. The longer you wait, the more the lightness emerges, it’s increase barely discernable yet all too fast. Every moment is nearly the most exquisite you’ve known. But you want to turn away. you understand beauty in a different way now, as this sky and sea begin to swirl with colours beyond any describing they stab at you, and you, small and dark and brittle cringe. There’s no one here but you, blood like bitter molasses, and the drum of your heart’s labour echoing in your ears. You squint at the irresistible display before you, it burns your eyes and your familiar hot tears find their tracks and you sigh. And cry again. And this vision before you becomes part of you as the sky and the sea and the lightening earth blur and repeat themselves inside of you.

You stand and pick your way gingerly across pebbles to the shoreline, the land which divides you from the water and the land whose hardness has refused to absorb you. It’s not so long since you were happy, but this morning you can’t recall a time you weren’t simply trying to avoid hurting. Your heavy head finds no respite on the pillow, your arms are mere flailing limbs with nothing to reach to. You’ve nowhere to walk to anymore. All you can think of is to tear at the earth to bury yourself or to swim.

And so your nature leads you into the water, to step out into the dark tides, your toes gripping at the slippery stones, waves drawing you further until you’re chest deep and finally your arms find rest on the ocean’s swells. You turn to the land, which finally has it’s morning and you see nothing there that you know or want to know so you kick out. Facing the sky you swim away, your arms and legs finding their rhythm and leading you further from where you were, and to where you don’t know.
Held in these amniotic waters, your ears and head now beat to the waves’ rhythm, and with each breath you take you taste sea or tears. When you can’t swim anymore you stop and tread water a last moment and look, and remember what you did love, still do, but can no longer bear, and you raise your arms, an almost prayer and submerge.