It is deep summer and I am sweaty and hunched over the side of the swimming pool. I am 10 years old but my scrunched nose is already losing its snubbiness to obstinate aquilinity. My brow furrows against the noon and the blinding chlorine sheen and my blazing self-consciousness. Naked, wet, prepubescent bodies crowd around me. Every jostling mound of unfreckled flesh stretching the back straps of swimsuits seems more at ease with its own existence than I could ever imagine. I have lost all hope for myself in the flood of such languidity, such happy comfort in defiance of what feels, to me, an insurmountable and unswimthroughable communal pool of insufferable discomfort. I am insufferable, crushed into a tiny invertebrate I hate by social alienation and a seemingly inveterate feeling of inferiority. I learned to breathe through my nose after doubled and redoubled efforts from coaches, overcoming the genetically labyrinthine difficulty my nose has found, since infancy, in coaxing air through its passages. So I am not afraid to dive. I speak in full sentences but only half-poems in my head. I start every internal sentence with “I,” just like this, because I am the only thing I know and am not wary of. I sog my sentences with sacks of adjectives and adverbs because I still do not understand action. Nonetheless, I plunge and drench. Acid blue, frantic movement. I open my eyes and mouth under water and feel briefly but pleasantly fishlike. Life is not so bad. What a lovely sensation, an ice-crack of release, to leap from sweaty concrete swaying from the heat-haze, to jackknife into an oceanic bloom, to feel the balloon-pop bursting away from your body all around you. You feel important in that moment, don’t you? The water says, “look what you have done” and explodes to embrace you by each atom. A lovely sensation. Life is not so bad. I will hunt that moment down, that interlude between heat-haze and cool, liquid clarity, for ten years to come.  I will love the color green because it falls peacefully between those two poles: cheery, alarming yellow and languorous blue. Trees and plants, the greenest among us, understand blue and yellow better than anyone else. They drink only sunshine and water and wear the color of my eyes on every finger. Butter and blueberries make, objectively, the best pancakes. Be as the pancakes are, says my ten-year-old self to my ten-year-old self, copefully. Unfortunately, I have developed a sense of humor funny only to myself, since I am the only person I hang out with. This would probably make the things I say even funnier to people, if I said them with bravado and staccato self-confidence, but of course I do not. My self is my whole world, I am ambivalent. I have occasional moments of what feel like greatness and unique understanding, and I feel destined for glory. But this gives me a frustration, hatred for, and obsession with other people, because they seem at ease and happy, and because they do not recognize my glory, and because I hate who I am around them, and because I hate hating. I become both avoidant and desperate, but spend most of my time alone out of sheer unavailability of human contact. I am homeschooled. I also glide underwater to the next side. I somersault as the concrete approaches and kick off a little unevenly for the next lap. The pointlessness of this never feels oppressive to me, for some reason. I daydream while I swim, just as I daydream while doing anything but reading. I live this time only for what my head and other heads create. I move fluidly between dreaming worlds and feel calm, so calm, so so calm when I am alone with words. A still, stretching pool for only me. I defend my words like a wolf mother and I return to their breast like a helpless child. Like a helpless child? I am a helpless child. But even this pleasant dreaminess, my private subterfuge of present evil, will be beaten out of me by the evil itself until I am too concrete, sweating and swaying and sinking through sterilized water. At the moment, in some sense, I believe in myself – that my opinions and perspective matter, and bring a unique value to an outer world that could be improved by them. I will lose this to a pathological fear of egotism, but will become egotistical anyways. I am not always so grim. I am really not always anything. Other than, perhaps, a proficient swimmer. I surface and return to the back of the line of waiting divers.