Peter Raffel
Bros
Excerpt
When I was twenty-one, during the winter of my third year in college, I returned to the pool after a prolonged hiatus. The intermediary years had not been kind. Swimming, like any rigorous sport—any skill-based activity, really—requires continual attunement, year-round training; it’s cliché, but in terms of aquatics, if you don’t use it, you lose it. During the subsequent years I worked as a coach, a great portion of my job involved urging teenagers to soldier ahead—to avoid summers off, long vacations without access to water, raucous weekends after season ended—if only not to make the same mistakes I did.
I joined my school’s Division III team, partway through the season, for two reasons: first, because I suspected that my girlfriend would soon break up with me, and to do nothing—to wait patiently for such an uncoupling—would certainly crush me; and second, because I could hardly stand to look at myself in the mirror. My corporeal transformation took me by surprise, though it really shouldn’t have—heavy drinking and unlimited access to an undergraduate cafeteria, plus a dearth of exercise, does wonders to the post-pubescent physique. I’d acquired what could only be described as a tummy, bulging from my once-comfortable shirts like an early stage of pregnancy—and this shift came upon me so cunningly. One day I was my slim, varsity-athlete self, stuffing any and all substances into my oblivious mouth, and the next I was seeing pictures of my figure, thinking it was just the angle, only to realize later that the angle had nothing to do with it.
My body had changed in other ways as well. Hair had erupted across my surfaces: arms, legs, back, chest, stomach, crotch—every inch of me covered in thick black forestry. There were scars now, blemishes, inconsistencies—markings that might’ve always been there but now came to the forefront of my observation. I felt bigger, though I hadn’t grown much in the interim—I suppose this is what people call filling out. More than anything, however, were the alterations to my face: brow furrowed, hints of eventual lines, eyes that seemed a little less wide—not dulled, but perhaps more wary. I attributed this, chiefly, to the termination of childhood, the end of innocence: I’d traveled to other continents, dated, driven cross-country, made and fallen out with friends, taken writing a bit more seriously. I’d heard that this time—the stretch between teenage abandon and whatever early adulthood is—could be swift and conniving, rendering you unrecognizable; and it was true, because I could hardly reconcile the boy I’d been and the man I was supposed to be. They looked like two different people.
To my surprise, the pool had changed as well. Most of this was situational: our university had a fifty-meter natatorium, with an intricate mosaic of windowpanes behind its one- and three-meter diving boards; light filtered in, even through winter, and at night halogen bulbs maintained a sense of kinetic energy—the pools I grew up in were dark, dank entities, like you were fighting your surroundings with every stroke. The locker areas were well-lit and multi-roomed, the toilets like hospital bathrooms, the floor lacquered rather than tiled—ours were spaces where one didn’t want to linger, nothing about them conducive to a post-workout cool-down. What I’d anticipated least, however, was that the thought of a pool—of any pool, anywhere—no longer felt threatening. We were nervous, initially, after this time away—like two dogs circling each other, trying to sniff out danger—but soon realized there was nothing to fear. I could get in, and swim laps, and let my mind wander, and not feel that subliminal urge to sink to the floor and release all the air from my chest. I was able to move forward with less courage than expected.
Of course, I was terrible. Everything about the experience was uncomfortable. Physically, my body broke down within a few hundred yards; the technical ability was there, but all the parts needed replacing; I’d languish mid-pool in a way that must’ve seemed simultaneously lethargic and effortful. And then mentally, there was the awareness that these practices were quantitatively very easy, and subjectively very hard; I’d been around long enough to know that what I struggled with now was laughable. I was widely ignored: my teammates had no opinion of me, beyond that I was a pain to lap; the coach was amiable but indifferent, gentler than most would’ve treated me—he could tell that I’d once been good but was well past my prime, and whatever this concerned was far more than his station demanded. There was this quiet understanding—if people were thinking about me at all—that I was engaging with something that mostly didn’t bother anyone, and so they might as well let me get on with it. Such a mentality could well sum up the ethos of a liberal arts institution—though, obviously, in the realm of athletics, a bit of solidarity wouldn’t hurt.
Nevertheless, I found that I didn’t want much more than this anyway. I wanted to start on the ground, cautiously, feeling my way back to a definition I’d pushed away so fervidly; I needed to do this alone, or at least with only the water—because we still spoke to each other, as much as I wished to deny this. There is something about swimming—something about anything we assent to at an age before memory, back when volition never crosses our fragile minds—that remains in the bloodstream, always calling back, the way we want to make peace with the parts of ourselves that we’ve cast off in anguish. At the time, I thought I hated my shape, and the idea of seclusion, enough to return to something I hated marginally less. Now, though, it strikes me that I’d always return, regardless of concrete reason—that we inhabit these endeavors not only because we know them, but because they know us as well. In this way, I think, it’s fruitless to seek closure on those endless years and infinite yards. We’ll always be what we once were.
About the Author
Peter Raffel studies Nonfiction at Columbia University. He lives in New York City and won’t shut up about it.