Swimming

   The light seemed to be far away, moving far from my fingers each time I moved my arms. The space I was in seemed very open and, for a moment, I felt that would be the feeling of being floating in space, without a proper astronaut suit of course. I have no idea why I thought that at that moment. Isn’t the brain supposed to prioritize things in our bodies in order to make us live longer? However, I could almost see the ship I had come out too, floating silently in front of me, and a big planet below me. But all that didn’t matter because I was about to die.

 The thought lasted just a second but it was strong enough for me to move faster, to force my tired arms to do a little bit more work. Every single vein and nerve in my body was crying in pain, my brain hurt so much I couldn’t stand it. I had always wished to be taller in order to have bigger arms and feet, which would have helped so much in that moment. But I wasn’t.  I was just the opposite of that and I was in a position where wishing was useless.

 My last movements towards the light were desperate. It was then when my body felt like it was empty. Every single thing that had no real use, every function that didn’t serve a purpose in that moment, they all disappeared in order to focus on the fact that I was going to die if my body didn’t perform something close to a miracle. Because I had never done what I about to do. It was a triumph I would never really be aware of and that’s ok because it worked.

 It was my right hand, my main hand if you will, the first limb of my body to feel the air outside. It felt terribly cold, colder that the water in the lagoon. The air seemed to be against me too but the difference was I could breathe that. The water was different, invasive and dangerous. Before and after that, I could never understand the people that are fascinated with water and would like to spend their lives in it.

 I guess that makes me a hypocrite. Because I kind of was one of those people before that. Since the earliest age, my parents took me to the ocean, to swimming pools, lake or wherever I could swim. I took classes and even competed for prizes when I was in school. Modesty aside, I won several of those competitions because I had a serious passion about the water, about how my body moved in it and it felt like home.

 The hard time would be during my teenage years when, for reasons I shouldn’t address, I became increasingly larger in size. And it was nature doing its job; it was more like junk food and sugar doing their thing. It was then when I got depressed for the very first time. Self diagnosed, of course. I never went to any doctor or shrink to tell me how I felt. Even at that age I found the concept ridiculous.

 Of course, I stopped my swimming. I was too big for the bathing suit and too sad to move my arms that fast. It was like that for years and I had to put away any remainder of who I had been before because it hurt too hard. Somehow, I had become a disappointment for myself. Is there anything more pathetic than that? I have no idea. The point is my attention shifted from one thing to the next. You can blame puberty for that. I just had to survive high school so, as when I swam, my body had to get its priorities straight.

 It was only in my last years of college, more than ten years after I had dropped out of the swim team in school, that I came back to the water. It’s amazing to think about it, but in that time I never really swam. Yes, I went to the beach or to houses with pools. But I would only be in the water for a moment, if at all. Maybe surprising but true. I felt I didn’t belong there anymore so why overstay my welcome?

 Aged twenty-three years old, I discovered a gym close to my house that had a swimming pool. The best part was you could reserve one of the swimming lanes for an hour and didn’t put anyone to tell you how to do anything. It was absolutely free of that. So I decided to go and, at first, I felt as drowned as in the lagoon. But I decided I would not ask for help and, slowly, it all came back to me.

 After my first week, the people that worked there congratulated me for my style, my technique. Although one of them reminded me, as if I didn’t know, that I was too short and that could be a problem. I know what he meant: being short in a pool is a problem because you take longer to reach the other side, even if it is by a few centimeters. Those can be decisive in a competition and they were certainly decisive in the lagoon. If I had been taller, the sense of terror would have been less powerful.

 When I had two arms outside of the water, the only thing I could do was taking a big breath. I felt alive, although barely. My legs hurt so much but they kept on moving until I reached the shore, which was obscured by the shadow caster over by the rocky structure above the lagoon. It was like a vault that enclosed the whole system. Why would I ever think it was a good idea to swim in a flooded cave?

 But as the soon got higher in the sky, the place seemed to get larger and the water revealed itself as so transparent and perfect. The sky was evenly reflected on its surface. It was so well done, the surface of the water, that had calmed down fast after I had gotten out of it, seemed like a huge mirror where God could check himself out.

 I lay down in my back, conscious I would have to swim back to the exit. Before I got comfortable, I checked for animals, bugs and others. After all, it was an arid place and little animals are known to live through the cracks of rocks and such. But when I was down, looking at the sky through the opening before me, I realized that was, again, my first time swimming in a very long time.

 The pool in the gymnasium was great. After some time, I got a proper job wearing a tie and a suit, which I’ve always hated, so I had to move my swimming hours to a later time. I would go the moment work finished, around six or seven in the afternoon. I would stay there for an hour, not stopping for more that a few seconds. I got new fans, new people that told me they were really surprised by me. I can’t tell you how much I loved that attention, which I had never gotten for anything else.

 However, I caught the eye of one particular person and from then on, I only cared about his comments and his smiles. I had learned not to let opportunities go by, so after a week of random looks, I decided to approach him after I was done swimming. It was weird because it was in the locker room, where people grabbed their stuff to have a shower or changed their clothes. He was wearing his bathing suit, like me, when I asked him if he would like to have a drink in a bar close to there.

 That was our first date. We considered it our first date a year later, when we celebrated the anniversary of our relationship. We didn’t really celebrate, we just got together and did the things we both like: we went swimming to a beautiful lake, we had a picnic with many delicious things to eat and we kissed and made love in my car, which was incredibly comfortable for such a vehicle.

 Our relationship lasted for almost three years. One month shy of our relationship turning three years old, he was assaulted in the street by some guy that wanted to steal his money. The guy had a gun and shot him with it, once. The bullet hit his spine. We all got to the hospital in time to say a few words. Then, he was gone. As if he had never existed. We had so many plans, a life of plans. This city is crazy.

 I came to the desert because of what happened. I needed to escape from everyone and everything. I still think about him, date and night. I cry for him and I also have wet dreams with him. But it’s in the water I feel him the most. I guess that’s why I challenged myself to swim through the flooded cave. And that’s why I’m challenging myself to go back. For him but also for me. I need to feel alive again.

Ariana & Sex

   Ariana loved sex. She didn’t just enjoy it; she actually adored all that she could feel while doing it. For this, she had been called “promiscuous” and even names like “whore” and “slut”. She did adhere to the thought that she was promiscuous. She did have sex with a larger array of men than usual but she wouldn’t call herself any other names than that. It wasn’t like she did it every single day with every guy she crossed on the sidewalk. She wasn’t a female predator or anything. No, she just loved pleasure.

 People that called her names were often part of one of two groups: the jealous women and the hurt men. The first group was very large and it consisted manly of women that were envious of her because she men were drawn to her. And what made them even more jealous was the fact that Ariana wasn’t the typical kind of girl that one would think was of the promiscuous kind. She wasn’t ugly either but that was alone enough to make all those girls go crazy.

 It has to be said, because people might be thinking it, that Ariana never slept with men that had any kind of relationships to other women. Of course, there were many that try to lie to her about it but, by now, she knew men so well she could tell if they were lying. And if that failed, she had learned to read cellphones and go through wallets without the guys even noticing it. This worked to her advantage very often.

 The other group actually departed from this first screening she did. The rejects, or men who she denied sex too, were often so offended that, instead of correcting their ways, they spread the word of her being someone less than a common prostitute. A man that is hurt is, however, not very dangerous. That is because they do it out of spite, like a small vengeance towards the girl, a childish reaction, to sum it up. And Ariana was simply bigger than that.

 The girls, however, could be very destructive. Some of them had actually done pretty awful things to her but Ariana just kept on going. She knew herself and wasn’t ashamed of anything. When confronted to any of those girls, she acknowledged what she did but she also asked them if they were also envious of her being more free and nice than any of them? Because she was, Ariana was not only liked because of sex. She was actually a great girl, compassionate and a great friend.

 So the name-calling was something she didn’t care about anymore. Ariana just had sex when she felt like it and that was all. She did it only with guys that had earned her trust and, as weird as it may sound, she always asked them for a date first. There, she realized if the guy would be a nice sex buddy or if he wanted more or even if he proved to be one of those obsessed guys that roam around the world. She knew the types and rapidly discarded the ones that she didn’t like and kept close those who she liked.

 Yes, there must be romantic souls reading this going “But what about love?”. Well, Ariana didn’t believed in love so that made all of what she did much easier. She formed no bonds with any of the guys and only slept with them three times, at most. After that she would just lose contact with them on purpose and, most of them, would understand. She did feel something special for a couple of guys but this proved to be that aching people have when being alone for too long. And that feeling doesn’t lead you to love but to despair.

 Of course, she always used protection and if a guy refused to use a condom, she would simply leave or she would expel him from her apartment, whichever was the appropriate thing to do. Besides, she had gone to several classes of personal defense; she was a green belt in karate and knew how to use a knife and a gun. All of this was because her father, a former policeman, had taught her how to defend herself and never allow anyone to turn her into a victim. Of course, all of this had come in handy in the last few years, when many guys stepped beyond the boundaries of their arrangement or when someone tried to mug her.

 She smiled every time she remembered people clapping on a bus when she almost broke a guy’s arm. As the bus was full, he had decided it was time to touch many ladies in their behind and even in other parts. But then he committed the stupid act of touching Ariana and he ended up in police custody. That moment made her proud because none of the other women there had reacted appropriately, all scared and screaming and waiting for others to react. Ariana just wasn’t the type.

 This toughness also attracted men. That’s why, during sex, she could use all that she had learned in self-defense but in a more pleasuring way. No man had ever said anything bad about it and it wasn’t very hard to tell if they were enjoying themselves or not. Actually, one of the things that she liked the most was the fact of feeling the other person’s pleasure. Just feeling it and looking straight at it. It was great and it felt better when she made them feel desired and unique.

 Ariana didn’t like the jock types. Most times she went out with too good looking guys, she would get soon very bored because those guys always think everything about them is just perfect and flawless when it’s not. That safety about themselves relies only in their looks and nothing more so when any woman looks beyond that, it isn’t a pretty sad. So abs and that metrosexual sense of fashion, wasn’t her thing. She did have some lovers of the sort but only because they had something else going on for them. But they weren’t the best lovers, not even close.

 The best lovers, she thought, were the ones that are a bit more reserved but not entirely shy. It’s the kind of guys that are nice and all but also have a bit of a dark side. She enjoyed that very much. Also, the guys that maybe most girls overlooked but which she senses had something going on for them. It was something hard to explain but she was sure many others felt it too. Because it was with guys like that with whom she realized she actually enjoyed sex, far beyond the final act of penetration. It sounds so awful but that’s the word.

 Many men and women think that’s all sex is about when it actually isn’t. Just think about it: you’re alone, naked, with a person you like, hopefully in many ways. Maybe there’s not love but there’s a particular interest, a kindred spirit if you will. How not to get pleasure from such experience? And how not to imagine so many ways to actually experience that moment. All senses are more acute when experiencing pleasure so Ariana knew exactly how to use them all, how to arose her and others, how to fully enjoy everything that the body is and gives.

 And, again, it wasn’t like she was having sex all over the place, every hour of the day. No. She enjoyed I but she wasn’t a freak about it. Some of the objects in a sex shop made her blush still and she only did have any sex with guys that convinced her of it. It wasn’t about fucking random guys. That wasn’t her deal. It was about sharing an experience she liked with people that understood that the body is much more than just a bag were we carry our souls.

 She shared most of her experiences with friends, because people who were really close to her knew about who and how she was and that didn’t bother her at all. She loved to tell and also to hear. Many of her friends, both women and men, asked her for advice and she would give them tips and advices on some tricks she had learned or read about somewhere or even seeing in a movie. She wanted others to enjoy themselves too, no matter if it was with their partners in life or with a new acquaintance or whoever.

 Ariana also learned a lot from her friends because, of course, she hadn’t done it all or anything. In many aspects, she was a very classic lover and it was always nice to give things a twist from time to time. Actually, she loved to talk to her lesbian and gay friends because they seemed to be a bit more open about their sex lives and also because they dared to go a little bit beyond what most straight couples did. Some things were surprising and others were simply too clever. In any case, she always remembered in time to practice them, if the moment was right.

 But anyway, Ariana is much more than a girl that loves sex and the pleasure it gives to people. She’s also an accomplished woman, always trying to better herself in order to learn more and enjoy life responsibly because, as she often states to her friends and lovers alike, “life is only one and it is too short to be spending it worried about what others might think of you”.