‘You’re pretty good at swimming, innit?’
How do you reply to this? Because I’m pretty sure I can’t say:
Yes, I’m better than you. But I have to admit I LOVE the way you swim. You know how Pheobe on Friends runs? That’s the way you swim. Childlike and carefree and weird.
It’s charming.
Instead I laugh in a self-depracating way and say, ‘I guess,’ before this guy embarks on a swimming related conversation. (If I want to reenter the heterosexual lifestyle I am now pretty well convinced it would be easy to do so from the swimming pool. This is two nights in a row I’ve had a friendly, albeit weird or drunk, man hit on me.)
This guy is weird, though. As I entered the locker room, all I could hear was insane splashing and lots of ‘You can do it! Go on!’ Don’t forget the heavy breathing, either. I groaned inwardly as it sounded like a family of five was swimming and it’s only a tiny pool.
So I peeked around the corner – nope, just this one guy. Freakishly bashing his arms into the water, stopping every five feet to huff and puff and/or egg himself on, swerving from side to side.
When I was in the pool with him, I noticed that he kept trying to swim underwater while repeatedly touching the bottom of the pool – presumeably to make sure of where he was, since he didn’t open his eyes. This also explains the wild careening from side to side.
And while I sound like I’m mocking him, I’m not. I meant what I said: I was quite taken with his swimming. It was joyful. He was having fun.
And surely that’s all that matters.
Tags: swimming
