I don't remember learning how to swim. It seems like something I've always known how to do. I remember learning one stroke—the butterfly—some time in elementary school, but learning the other strokes was like learning how to read. Once I could do them, I couldn't imagine not being able to do them.

When I was in high school, I was on the swim team. I swam fly: the 50 fly in the medley relay and the 100 fly individually. I swam other events, too, but those never felt like mine. Strange that I gravitated towards the only stroke I recall actually having to learn; I don't know what that means. I smelled a little like chlorine most of the time, a lot like chlorine some of the time.

I also lifted weights. My legs are naturally much stronger than my arms and shoulders, but I was working out around 15 hours each week, and my shoulders and back grew enormous. An enormous that I quite liked. I remember trying on formal dresses with my friend Rachel—unlike me, she was built to do amazing things with her arms. She started lifting weights about a year after I did. The very first time she ever had a go at the bench press, she kept asking me to add weight, and I told her that she needn't take things too fast, that she didn't want to hurt herself. But she really did know what she could handle, and what she could handle was three sets of ten at 140 pounds. Her very first time lifting, ever. She later went on to be an NCAA All-American because she could shot put and throw the discus—especially the discus—like no one else I've known personally. And, before this dance we were going to, she and I tried on formal dresses, flexed at each other in the mirrors, and laughed. We both had to buy dresses that were two sizes too big for every part of our bodies but our backs.

I knew I was strong. I knew I could swim for hours and swim some more, and I still love the feel of it. Running competitively ruined me for running; I still do it occasionally, when I hit a workout stride, but for me, it lacks the kind of purity that swimming still holds. I'm sure this has everything to do with where I was emotionally when I started to get sick at every track meet, with the injuries I ran through in spite of the fact that I was really too injured to be running, rather than with the activities themselves. But the swimming... there was a rhythm to it, a peaceful, almost meditative quality.

That's what I was thinking about when I was on vacation with my family in Maui, where I did a great deal of ocean swimming. Ocean swimming is different from pool swimming. Salt water makes the body float more easily, currents require that you compensate for movements you didn't necessarily expect, and waves make it necessary to turn your head farther to the side when you breathe. And there's always the awareness that you don't know exactly what's beneath you or where the bottom is.

One afternoon on this family vacation, my stepfather and I decided to take a swim out to a buoy that was some distance from the shore. We had done this swim several days in a row, and it was starting to become a vacation ritual—strange that such a term makes sense, no?—but on this afternoon, we miscalculated. It was too late to be out for a swim in the ocean. We swam, and I aimed for the buoy, paying no attention to anything else. I reached it, and then took a moment to tread water and look around me.

Everything was black. The sun had gone down, gone down that fast, and I could no longer see anything. I wasn't tired, but I tried to stave off the panic I was feeling. Which direction, which way? I turned around, and around, but I didn't know. And then I saw some lights—faintly, because we weren't staying in a metropolitan area—and I knew that I should aim for them. So I did, but as I swam back, I was acutely aware that the current seemed much stronger than it had seemed on my way out, that I was perhaps getting turned around, and that I was in the middle of something huge, huge and powerful.

I looked up to reorient myself periodically, and I kept swimming. I remember the feeling of relief that came over me when I first was able to touch sand with my feet when I looked up, and I remember finally stepping out of the ocean at a spot nearly 200 yards to the right of where I had started. I walked along the shoreline and found my very concerned father waiting for me—he had noticed that it was getting dark early in our swim, and he turned back after trying to get my attention with no luck.

I wonder where the shoreline is now, and I wonder if I have enough energy to get there. I see some lights, but they seem distant, and I keep having to check to make sure they are still there. I'm afraid. Afraid that I don't have enough energy, afraid that even if I do make it, everything will be changed once I have returned. That I won't reach the spot where I started, but will instead return to a shoreline that itself has shifted 200 yards right. Not me, it.

And I wonder how long I can tread water.