DELPHI: I am not sure I am human anymore. And I do not mean that in the sense where I am something more . . . Something godlike. Instead, I am something worse. Animalistic, maybe. Or perhaps something less. Longing, missing parts, rusting . . . Freezing. I am not myself, is what mean . . . I do not know myself. How can that be?
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I have a scar on my forehead from the deep end of a swimming pool. It was summer, and I liked to dive under and hold my breath. See how long I could sit on the tiles at the bottom for and enjoy the quiet. See if I could feel the sun under there. See if anyone would notice how good I was at disappearing for a little while under the commotion.
I stopped doing it when a kid drowned in that same pool the year I turned nine. They said he had been drunk after a night spent on the beach, and some friends had dared him to jump in.
They said he splashed, and laughed, and choked and then he didn't do anything after that.
They said his friends left him, floating there, face down in the pool.
I was thirteen the next time I tried it again. Teenage angst and despair at the world bubbled inside of me, and I wanted to disappear like I used to when I wore a one piece and men's gazes didn't linger on me yet.
So I did it. And now I have a scar on my forehead from the deep end of that pool and a story that could have ended the same way as that other kid.
I'm not really sure what happened to me. But there was clear water one moment and red the next and fluid where air should have been in my lungs.
My Mom asked me, when they had stitched my skin back together and put my front teeth back in, what drowning feels like.
I hadn't thought about it. Not really. It isn't that I can't remember it - there was panic and thrashing for a stretched out moment, and then there was numbness and acceptance and —
