Writing Prompt: It was at the age of thirty-five that I finally learned to swim.

Ah Tuesday morning, a relief after the back to work shock of Monday. I had very strange dreams about dancing zombies. Not in the Michael Jackson Thriller sort of way but they were putting on the nutcracker and parts started falling off. Plus to get them into place stage hands had glass jars with brains suspended on the ends of fishing poles. The brains were bobbing about in their jars. It was a rather odd dream. But for now we set it aside and jump into the morning prompt. Even if the Nutcracker theme song is still playing in my brain. Timers set and off we go.

I like this. No clue where it is going but somehow, I like the tone of it and the character. I just need to find the details of the story.

Tuesday, November 18^th: It was at the age of thirty-five that I finally learned to swim.

It was at the age of thirty-five that I finally learned to swim.  It wasn’t my idea.  Or at least not exactly my idea.  I did my best to avoid deep water.  And shallow water.  I took showers and never sat in a bath.  I didn’t even step in puddles if I could help it. 

It wasn’t that I was afraid of water.  I liked it actually.  When it was heated to a proper temperature, purified of any contaminants and generally smelled like my body wash.  When I was a child, my grandmother would tell me stories of people contracting things like polio and typhoid from swimming.

I never looked into it and didn’t know if the stories were accurate or something she made up but it always seemed to me that there were things in the water.  In school we had a science lecture where we took a microscope and looked into a petri dish filled with river water.  There were things wriggling about in it.  Things that couldn’t be seen by the naked eye. 

That was when I decided natural bodies of water weren’t for me.  Then there were other stories, generally involving people peeing in swimming pools that turned me off the man made swimming areas.  Then I thought about how bathing was supposed to wash bits of things off of you.  Dirt and dust, dead skin cells and whatever else might be clinging to your body.

It seemed madness to rinse it off and then marinade myself in the water filled with everything I just rinsed off myself.  I passed my collection of plastic boats to my brother to play with and switched to showers. I could barely reach the taps, but the effort seemed worth it. 

My parents thought I was simply growing up, believing baths were for smaller children.  I never corrected them. Later, I realized there were also invisible things floating through the air, but I figured as my body was designed to breath air and not water, I might be safer with them.

Besides, unless I wanted to live in a bubble, avoiding contaminated air would be extremely difficult. And I wasn’t strictly speaking afraid of germs.  It was just that water seemed like such an alien environment, and I thought it best to avoid the creatures populating it.

Avoiding water publicly became easier as I aged.  While no one thinks too much about swimming parties for children, as an adult such invitations became significantly less frequent. And refusing to swim far more acceptable should one be unable to refuse the invitation given.  After all, not everyone is willing to parade amongst others in a swimsuit. Skin needed to be protected from the sun and fat from the ogling.

No one even noticed my avoidance of puddles.

I thought I was in the clear until of course that fateful year when Maria invited me to join her on a cruise. 

I say invitation, but there was an underlying sense of commandment.  She was going on the cruise.  All her family was going on the cruise.  If, as the ring I put on her finger earlier that month suggested, I wanted to join her family, I too would be going on the cruise. 

Refusal would mean other substantial changes would be made to my life.

I thought about it and decided I didn’t want to make those changes. I would be going on the cruise.  I also thought that getting on a boat destined for the middle of the ocean without knowing how to swim was a monumentally stupid idea.  So, against my better judgment, I signed up for lessons.