slow swim

"You'll never know unless you try," my big sister Tasha said sarcastically. 

I looked over the edge at the blue ocean waters with a gut sharp desire to jump. The ability to swim was no longer known to us, so Tasha knew I wouldn't be able to do it. 

She liked calling me out on my seemingly illogical ideas. She'd thrown in all the rational reasons why I shouldn't, and I'd just lean deeper into my instincts. 

Both of our parents died in a boating accident a decade and a half ago. I took on a fascination with water and an optimistic viewpoint of life after they passed, whereas Tasha became the opposite. 

I started walking away from the edge, and she followed after me, chatting about what she wanted for lunch. She thought I was just walking away, but I was very much up to a thing. 

Thirty feet away, halfway through her bringing up tuna sandwiches for lunch - thank goodness I'd miss out on that - I turned around and started running towards the edge. My heart raced with excitement and wonder.

We've always been close, my sister and I. So it was somehow not surprising that she took after me, shouting something that got swallowed up by the wind swishing in my ears. 

Maybe I should have thought about her more before I jumped, considering she'd be alone now in the world, but I simply felt unable to stop myself. Maybe I was just as selfish as our parents for going towards water when the chance of death was absolutely certain.  

At first I began to fall fast, but then I started falling impossibly slow. Everything else around me was moving in time: the water was still hitting up against the rocks with a force I should have been deterred by; birds were flying by as though nothing crazy was happening below them. 

There was a pond nearby. I could have gone in there to learn this swimming thing, but something sirened me to jump. 

I should have been in the water by now, swimming - or quite likely dying, but I was only about 10 feet down with about 40 more to go.

The next thing I knew, my sister was also falling in slow motion alongside me, but she was head down and spinning upside. She tried to grab me when I jumped, I recalled, but the force of my fall dragged her over. 

Yet that didn't make sense because we were moving so slow now. Maybe the first few seconds were fast, but then this? Whatever this is. 

We locked eyes. "What are you doing?!" I asked stupidly. I was somehow surprised my voice was in true motion.

She was a mixture of raw fear and surprise, too. "How is this happening?" she asked as her body finally settled right side up. 

"I don't know!" I yelled at her equally stupid question. "But it's really cool!" I started laughing even though we were very much still falling. 

She looked down. "Jess, we're going to die. We're going to die so slow that we'll feel everything." She was acting like a secondary character in a horror movie, you know, the kind who just assumed everything was about to go all kinds of wrong. 

Still, I looked down and knew she could be right. Yet I wasn't worried. I reached out for her cold hands and we held each other in mid air as we looked downward at our fate.

"What an interesting way to die," she said with the only bit of serenity I've heard in years as she looked at the view. It was spectacular to see the ocean this way. "We can see it happening but we won't get there yet. What do we do when we hit the water?" she asked me.

"Why are you asking me?!" 

"You're the one with 12 dumb ideas every hour," she answered as if I should have known her answer.

"We swim," I said confidently as we lost 15 feet altogether. 

She chuckled. "Even in the face of a wet death, you're still trying to swim? It's like everything that should be up here disappears 12 times a day." She butted my head lightly with hers, still clinging to my hands. 

"We might as well swim, Tasha. The way we're falling is impossible. What's wrong with two impossibilities?" I didn't sound convincing on this one.

She looked down and then back at me. "Only one at a time can exist?" she asked hesitantly.

"Let's practice." I reluctantly released her hands. "Okay, so you're supposed to kick your legs like this and move your arms like this." I demonstrated my best understanding of swimming. I embodied the phrase "a fish out of water".

She made a fickle attempt at mimicking me, but I bet I looked just as horrendous trying to do something that only now existed in books. I was happy she was trying. 

"I'm sorry my choice brought you over the edge, too," I said remorsefully as 10 more feet came and went. 

"That's what sisters are for," she said with a smile I didn't expect. "In some really weird way, I'm happy even though I know I should be mad that I'm going to die. Maybe I'm just tired."

I held her again because even though I was the optimist, sometimes I felt tired, too. Losing our parents made us age faster. 

"I wonder how mom and dad felt," I mused as I looked out at the ocean.

"Scared," she answered. "But they had each other like we do now, and we know they tried to swim."

It was true. Everyone else on the boat gave up, but they tried. We were proud of that. 

"We'll make them proud, whether this thing ends with us seeing them, or if we somehow make it through this," I said confidently.

"Agreed!" she said and gave me a tight hug filled with encouragement. 

On our last feet of air space, I squeezed my sister's hand. "I love you, Tasha-Mae."

"I love you, too Tessa-Mae," she said with a grin.

When our feet touched the water, the slow motion continued. The water was ice cold, but our adrenaline barely registered it. 

"Warm thoughts!" she yelled even though her voice was panic ridden.

"Swim!" I yelled as our entire body became water bound.

At first we just kept sinking in slow motion…

The blue was more intense…

The cold was tolerable even though it shouldn't have been…

Still we kept up our arm and leg movements in motion with the intent to push to the surface, to be baptized as second generation swimmers…