One day a year you should swim around Prinseneiland and this year that was yesterday.
Though it would take Michael Phelps only a few minutes to cover the distance, for you, having not so much as looked at a gym since before Covid, this will be twenty-plus minutes in freezing water wondering if you’ll survive, especially because one of the three bridges you pass under you just recently designated the place you will die.
Was that a mistake? A few months ago? After an odd and sharp pain in your chest leads to panicked thoughts? (“Is this it? Is this where it ends?”) To then meditate on where indeed you want your final crossing to be? And then to think, why not here? At this very bridge you otherwise love?
(About the chest pain and the panic: Getting older is not just fearful because you grow weaker and slower and invisible to others, but also because you must interpret new kinds of alarms that go off in your body, alarms that remind you of the friends younger than you who have already died and which are all the more alarming because a body you had good reason to think you were familiar with now signals to you from parts of itself you’ve never felt before, the “wait, that’s not good” fear much amplified by the “what the hell is that?” frequency it signals you on.)
Most days, lost in thoughts of coffee or groceries, you do not remember the flag you planted at this bridge before you cross it, any thought of doom it unfulrls too silly, usually, to bother with if you do.
But drama builds on drama and the elephant will not stay in its room and while fatigue and cold and focus on alternating between breaststroke and backstroke mean you forget all about your bridge for the entirety of your swim, this you can no longer do once it looms ahead and, especially, during those five seconds it blocks out any sky, that spot where you are most likely to cramp up or stroke out or have a heart attack not because you are in eight feet of water and old and out of shape but because, if prophecy from above is to be self-fufilled, it will be fulfilled here and now, just under the bridge of death.
Where, as I say, yesterday I did my once a year dog paddle.