BCPRESS

“It is now 4 o’clock, and you’re listening to HIT FM.”

            The radio blasted out of the darkness. I turned my body and buried my face into the car seat, desperately trying to grab onto the darkness, to hold it together in the face of external intrusions.

            “Up next is another hot song from Twenty-One Pilots: Stressed Out—”

            My efforts soon proved fruitless. I clambered up and slumped against the car door in the backseat, gazing outside at passing cars and buildings of a windy Friday afternoon, whose muffled blares and varying outlines held great excitement, excitement which seemed especially inciting when paired with the music and compared with the dim and unexciting solitude from before, yet excitement which I could not bring myself to become excited about. In front of me, my lanyard dangled from the driver’s seat, the poorly taken yearbook photo looking ever so stretched and distorted as it swung around in a contorted circular motion. The song continued in the background:

            “I wish I found some better sounds no one’s ever heard,

            “I wish I found a better voice that sang some better words.”

In the front seat, my mother hummed as she guided the steering wheel, tuning the volume done when the song drowned out her voice. She gently swerved the car left, turning away from the intersection’s cacophony into the calmness of a discreet street. My eyelids began to droop, and the song’s lyrics faded into a background drone as I re-embraced the dark solitude from before. 

“I was told when I got older, all my fears would shrink,

            “But now I’m insecure, and I care what people think.”

“You know, when I get home, it’s homework, then hours of free time. Well, the precise amount depends on the amount of homework (it’s grown quite a bit, don’t you think?), but still, hours – I have none of those BS classes, and my parents don’t care if I game or not,” one of my classmates had said.

“That’s cool and all, but you should try some sports,” another kid said. “I don’t have that many classes, but I play soccer, and have a bunch of friends who play it too. We go to the same club.” He turned to look at me. “You should try it sometime, it’s way funner than swimming.”

                  “My name’s blurryface and I, care what you think.”

                  “My name’s blurryface and I, care what you think.”

            A car horn snapped me back to consciousness as our car slowed down at the gate of a well-worn parking lot in front of a squat, pallid building. The bland, colorless style was so drab that it repelled second looks from passersby. It took me a while to realize it was the swimming training center – a bit odd, considering it was the same building I’d been staring at four days a week for the last three years. My backup lay on the other end of the seat, stuffed with unfinished work from math, English, humanities, Chinese, and other subjects I did not want to think about.

            “Wish we could turn back time,

            “To the good old da-ays (oh).”

            My backup wasn’t always stuffed like this.

            “When our mama sang – us to sleep,

            “But now we’re stressed out–”

            A few months ago, all I did and needed to worry about was watching “educational” cartoons teachers play in school, and watching the cartoons I wanted to watch for as long as I wanted at home. Well, as long as it came after training.    

            “We’re here,” my mother announced, turning the radio off. The sky was dark already. We had parked in a remote corner.

            My mother stepped out of the car, her dress flapping against the wind, and opened my door.

            “Time to go,” she said.

            waySilence. I turned my back on her and said nothing. The only sound was that of the wind.    

            “Come on,” she said, trying to grab my arm.

            “I don’t want to go,” I said – quietly – avoiding her hand.

“We told Coach we were going, and 我们说话要算数 [we’ve got to honor our promise]—”

            “No,” I said, louder.

            “What did you say?”

            “No!” I said, even louder. “I don’t want to go! I hate swimming!”

            My mother grabbed my wrist. I wrestled her hand away.

            “You’re just tired from school—”

            “NO!” I shouted. “I hate it – I HATE swimming! It’s boring and tiring and very few of my friends do it, and I wish I’d never done it in the first place, and don’t ever want to do it again!”

            My mother fell silent, her hands freezing in mid-air. She glared and me and I glared back, watching as her features tightened and her lips pursed. The only sound was that of the wind.

A few moments later, she signed and turned away, going back to the driver’s seat and typing something on her phone. Then she restarted the car, turning the radio off before it turned on. We didn’t speak again for the rest of the evening.

***

            I didn’t go to training that day. Nor that weekend. Nor the next week. It wasn’t until the next Sunday that I thought of it again at all.  

            It was a bright afternoon, the sun shining through the leaves to adorn the ground in sparse yet vibrant patterns. On the ground, two sparrows pecked around for insects and sticks, their bodies merging with the shadowy patterns and their chirps occasionally breaking through the gushing sound of the compound fountain, shifting past the branches and leaves to enter my room through the window slit. Inside, I rested my head on my hand, transfixed on the scenery outside. Not that it was particularly attractive – most of the branches were bare, and a large part of my view was blocked by three giant trash cans – but because of just how weird it felt.  

            Now, this feeling of unfamiliarity wasn’t all that unfamiliar – it had announced its presence on the afternoon of Monday, Wednesday, Friday, when the car skipped the familiar left turn and headed straight down the intersection. But then, what would’ve been time, hours, spent swimming was now given to me to do what I wanted – the only problem was that I had no idea of what I wanted, of what I felt but for the sickening feeling that something was amiss.

            I slumped down against my desk. As my fingers drummed against the wooden desk, my mind drifted back to the training session, to the familiar scenes which I still viewed as “routine”: the coach’s whistles piercing through the air, the splashes of water as others dived in, the younger swimmers pushing their limits and trying their best to stay afloat while older members glided gracefully through the surface. My youthful recalling was so vivid that I could almost feel the cool pool water rushing through me as I dove in, freezing my teeth off yet sending adrenaline surging through my veins.

            And the feeling after training. Ah, that feeling. It was the feeling of knowing you’ve spent yourself physically, of now being cleansed of all the negative thoughts and mental drain developed elsewhere, with your hair still clamming to your head and your breath fresh against the car window. As if on thought, I felt the same feeling spread throughout me right now, the overall sense of tired satisfaction that I never consciously thought about yet made the past two hours of sweat and tears all worth it.

            Still. A voice whispered from the back of my head. Remember why you wanted to quit. It’s not like it’s voluntary – you just have too much stuff to do.

            I stared at the book by my elbow, which was flipped to its first page and had been for the last 30 minutes. Besides it laid a homework sheet, one which only had one page with ten blanks, yet which only had one completed after the last 2 hours when it should theoretically take 2 minutes.

            I don’t know… do I?

            The voice urged on. There are also so many other things you could be doing, many better, more interesting things.

            Are there?

            The feeling of tired satisfaction remained as I questioned the voice, which went silent after the last question. I wasn’t sure of the other things that I might want to do, yet I was sure of something that I could do right then.

            I stood up. The feeling evaporated, yet its traces lingered in the back of my mind as I marched into the living room.  

            “I maybe want to go to training on Monday,” I announced to my mother.

            “Maybe?”

            “Maybe.” I shrugged.

            “I thought you weren’t going to swim anymore.”

            “I maybe want to continue.”

            “Maybe?”

            “Maybe.” My mother eyed me suspiciously.  

            “I’ll bring your stuff on Monday,” she said slowly, “and you can decide whether you want to go or not.”

            I nodded, and turned around and went back into my room, where I immediately set myself to finishing the remaining nine blanks. Outside the window, the sparrows had found what they had been looking for, and had fluttered away to do whatever it was that sparrows do.

***

Monday. Intersection. I stared at the traffic lights, which had just turned red. Like the drivers around us, my mother tightened her grip on the steering wheel and readied her foot on the gas pedal.

“So, are you going to training?”

“Uh—”

“No uh’s or um’s. I need a decisive answer: yes,or no.”

Despite the air-conditioning, I found my neck clammy with perspiration as my mind was pestered with doubts, skeptic voices like the one from before joining together to form a cacophony of dissonance.

Too boring, tiring…

Motivating, invigorating…

Not enough time…

Plenty of time…

You shouldn’t go…

You should…

            “Yes, or no,” my mother repeated herself.  

            I don’t know…

            The lights turned green, and the doubts evaporated.  I blurted a word.

***

            As the car exited the parking lot, and as I lay exhausted yet satisfied against the back seat, staring at the passing buildings as my breath fogged up the window, I wondered whether or not I had made the right choice. Was it right for me to persevere, or were the doubts reasonable concerns that I should have given in to?

            Since then, I’ve spent countless hours in the swimming pool, and while I wasn’t the fastest, and never thought of swimming as a possible career developed, it went on to become the only aspect of my life that remained constant everything else swirled and changed around it. When the pressure from school gets a bit too high, or when I’m not satisfied with what I see when I look in the mirror, I know I always had a way out (at least for a few hours): the ability to dive into icy cold water and walk away feeling physically spent yet mentally content. And while I may have found some other sport if I backed away from swimming, it has become such a large influence over me and my immediate family’s lives that I just can’t imagine them without it.