Crying in the steam room on the last working day of the year

"everybody's saying it cures everything"

When I tell people that I taught myself to swim when my dad was dying, I think they imagine something far more graceful than the reality.

For most of my life, I thought I was terrified of water. An inciting incident: a swimming instructor, when I was very young, who made us line up at the edge of the old Johnstone baths and told us to jump one by one, me folding my tiny white arms across my chest and refusing. High school spent with a kickboard in the shallow end, the PE teacher who wrote to the only girl I’ve ever met who can swim without getting her hair wet in my leavers’ book. The terror of not being able to touch the bottom with my toes.

I swam a couple of times on holiday, and a couple with my mum. My body was soft, ungainly - the movement was something I had to concentrate on. It was meditative, almost: when, as is frequently the case, my mind would wander to whatever was the latest thing somebody expected me to fix I could end up choking, water up my nose. My mum, herself a former swimming instructor, always said I had a beautiful leg kick but what I mostly am is ferocious in the water, less mermaid than tornado. My arms, somewhere between what a professional would call breast stroke and a drowning dog.

I take off my glasses in the pool which leaves me as vulnerable as they come, half-blind and near-naked. Right now there are two black bruises, equidistant on my thighs: they’re roughly the size of small coins or like somebody has taken their thumbs and pressed, and pressed. (Sometimes, that someone is me - revelling in the dull pain in the same way I often worry with my tongue at the tooth I cracked during the pandemic.) I can’t often keep straight lines, so if there are more than a few people in the pool I shy away from taking up too much space. But when there’s nobody around I let my limbs splay, rejoicing in sheer freedom.

Bobby says she has this fantasy where I switch my phone off and check myself into a hotel for a few days, and I think it’s unsurprising that I’m so drawn to a hobby that renders me uncontactable. Up on my front, down on my back: I go until the timer on my wrist hits half an hour. A children’s instructor, free of a lesson one day, told me I should alternate with backstroke or I’d risk lower back pain, which I already get when I sit at my desk for too long; getting over the terror of mis-judging and hitting my head was worth it for the feeling I get when I push off and let the momentum take me for a few seconds. I breathe as my feet rise and then my hips, let my shoulders relax and rest my hands in the curve at the base of my spine. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to weightlessness, and sometimes tears well up from the magic of it.

In the water, nobody can tell that you’re crying.

But the real reason I’m a swimmer is hidden in my phone: a freak software glitch that recorded my dad’s side of a quick, nothing-special phone conversation to voicemail. “I know it’s you!” I hear him say, in that teasing way he always did. “Swimming? Good for you, my girl. Wish I could do things like that.”

Just 11 weeks later he was gone, and so, I kept going.

Liner notes

• If you’re wondering why the name

• I wrote about a bunch of songs I liked in 2023 in the old place

• There’s a Spotify playlist too - I’d do the same on Apple Music, but I’m yet to figure out how

• See you in two weeks? That sounds doable, right?!