I've always spoken about how I wish I knew how to swim, but if there's one story I realize that I haven't told you guys, it is that I actually did try to learn one time, but it didn't go so well, so I haven't gotten into a pool ever since.
photo by Serena Repice Lentini
After my friend almost lost his life while swimming in a pool for the first time, I made a promise to myself never to get close to any pool, because apparently Black people don't swim. Lol
Anyway, I kept to that promise until some time last year when I went out with my friends and got drunk, and due to the fact that I was under the influence of alcohol, that was all the motivation I needed for me to decide that it would be a good idea to finally see if I could swim or not.
Now that I'm writing about it, can we just pause for a minute to acknowledge how crazy that whole thing was? Me deciding to do something when I'm drunk, something I normally wouldn't do when I'm sober because of fear of it taking my life.
Well, luckily for me, I wasn't stupid enough to get into the pool alone. I had gone in with a guy who works as a promoter at the hotel where the pool was located, and for some weird reason that night, the guy had on a skirt instead of normal swimming trunks.
Anyway, we both got into the water, and he tried explaining to the best of his abilities how I should go about the entire thing, an explanation that, at the time, I understood perfectly, only for me to dive in and find myself drinking up all of that dirty water.
I tried it a couple of times, and by my third try of helplessly struggling with the water, the guy who was teaching me for free gave up and left me. That was all the cue I needed to know that I had to get out of the water myself and just go sit down quietly in a corner, which was exactly what I did.
Thank God nothing crazy happened back then, or maybe it did; I just don't remember it.