Looking Up from the Bottom of the Pool and the People I Will Never Meet Again
When I was a child, I liked sitting at the bottom of the pool.
I would take a deep breath, sink my body, and press my hips against the rough concrete of the floor. Then I would look up. There, I found another world.
The water surface rippled in silver, and the sun lost its shape, spreading across everything as a net of swaying light. Sounds from above were distant and muffled, and someone's laughter reached me slowly through the water.
That was probably the first way I ever found to take a step back from the world.
I could only hold my breath for thirty seconds at most. During those thirty seconds, I did not belong to the world. Yet, even though I didn't belong, I could see the world clearly.
In fact, it looked even more beautiful than it usually did.
By the way, there is something I realized after becoming an adult.
It is that I will never meet the majority of the people I have encountered in my life again.
The friend I dove with in the elementary school pool. The kid who sat next to me in summer school. The senior I worked with for only three months at a part-time job. The neighbor who moved away.
For a certain period, they and I were certainly in the same water. We saw the same light and heard the same laughter as muffled sounds. And yet, at some point, without any ritual of farewell, we each surfaced to our own water levels and climbed onto separate pool decks. And we never met again.
For a long time, I thought this was a lonely thing. Like a collection of failures in human relationships.
But recently, my thinking has changed a little.
I want you to remember the sun you looked up at from the bottom of the pool.
It wasn't the sun itself. It was light that had swayed, shattered, and turned into a net. But we thought it was beautiful. Even more beautiful than the real thing.
The people I will never meet again are probably the same. Through the water of memory, they sway, distort a little, and become a light softer than the real thing, still shimmering in the upper reaches of my vision. Because we don't meet, they can remain in summer forever.
If we were to meet again now, what would happen?
We would both have aged, we would search for topics to talk about and laugh awkwardly, and the swaying light would be fixed in place. That wouldn't be bad, either. But it is not essential.
In this world, there are relationships that are completed on this side of the water's surface, and relationships that are most beautiful when left on the other side.
Now that I am past forty, I finally understand that there is no need to call the latter a failure.
Summer is coming again this year.
At the bottom of some pool, someone is holding their breath, looking up at the swaying light.
For just thirty seconds, from outside the world.
That child, too, will one day know.
That within that net of light, everyone they would ever meet and part with was already reflected.
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