21 Miles by Jessica Hepburn

Author:Jessica Hepburn [Hepburn, Jessica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783526116
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2018-02-25T16:00:00+00:00

The Solitude of Swimming

In the pool today, on my forty-fourth birthday, I spent 110 lengths wondering how you write about someone and something that you’re not supposed to be writing about. Has grief driven us apart? Or was it holding us together in the first place? I’m not entirely sure what’s happened, but I know something has. I feel us disappearing from one another. I can’t hold on as tight any more.

Was I was naive to think that this new journey I’ve embarked on was somehow our journey, like the last one we travelled together? How could it be, with all these hours in the pool alone? There is nothing more solitary than swimming. Has my longed-for redemption become just another way of redoubling my pain? Because, like Nicola Horlick – the woman who doesn’t have it all – I harbour a fundamental fear of being alone: of dying without my children by my side, of a funeral with no one there. Yet I thought that there would always be you, and now I don’t know. In the end, like the solitude of swimming, perhaps we all have to come to terms with our fundamental aloneness in the world.

I can feel tears in my goggles but here in the pool no one knows, not even the water, because water only knows tears as itself. I’m at a loss what to do so I keep swimming, silently counting the lengths.

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