Surreal Beginnings

 We are creatures of our environment. Or at least I am. What I mean by that is that I am always thinking the most about wherever I am in life, in the school year, in my relationships--and it’s hard for me to remove myself from my immediate world. So, I’m not going to pretend that this blog will be a forum for whimsical or wordly writing. Instead I can do nothing else but focus on the random details of my life, however mundane or irrelevant and do my best to show you how I view them.

            As I sit here contemplating what my life is comprised of at this moment, several things come to mind, and none are particularly uplifting, though necessary rites of passage for most high school students. You know, the scintillating daily grind of school, homework (the occasional extra-curricular), sleep, and sports. The latter is what most interests me here--more specifically swimming, my sport of “choice.” Don’t get me wrong, I do swim on my own volition, but sometimes I think that at the beginning of the season something insidious inside of me peeps its head and whispers in my ear that swimming is somehow a good idea. Not that I hate the actual act of swimming; in fact, the second I jump in the pool and start the (at first) smooth strokes of my warm up I know that swimming is good for me, and that it’s all worth it. But, without a doubt the hardest part of the season is the thirty some minutes between my wake-up alarm at five a.m. and the collective mad jump into the pool at five thirty.

            Let me lay it out for you. In most of my life I feel pretty confident that I live in a realist world. Things align themselves according to conventional knowledge and I don’t second-guess what I see or hear. But in those thirty minutes before practice, different rules apply and my world seems surreal and confusing. I have some attachment to the idea of self reliance--not expecting my parents to do everything for me (even though I suspect it ends up that way anyways)--and for the last couple of years that has manifested in my perhaps misguided efforts to bike to practice every morning (at 5:10 a.m.), this experience being what is most surreal in my morning routine. Backing up ten minutes to give the full scoop; my morning begins at five a.m. when the first alarm on my phone rings--I can never seem to remember the sound once I am fully awake but during those moments in between sleep and semi-wakefulness, the less than five note tone seems to engulf my world and drown out any other thought. And it repeats five minutes later because I feel that I need that period between alarms where I have vague awareness of having to get up yet still feel no obligation to move. It’s weird how five minutes at the end of a class can seem like an eternity yet these five minutes seem like a snap of my fingers.

            Once I actually manage to rouse myself--an automatic thing for me now--once that 5:05 alarm rings, I instantaneously swing myself out of bed (because I know that any waiting and I will fall back asleep and miss practice, “god forbid!”), I follow a set of actions like clockwork. The house is silent as I throw on my suit and shorts, gather up my backpack, pick up my lunch from the fridge, and glide outside into my garage. Actually it’s more of a slow clomp, but I like to pretend otherwise. It’s hard to convey how this part of my morning is surreal, but I think what it comes down to is that I feel as though I am the only person alive. When I turn on my garage light I imagine myself as surrounded by a little bubble of warmth in a sea of darkness--and when I depart on my bike, I feel like I’m doing something exciting, risky, uncharted. Out of the corner of my eye I constantly see things that aren’t there--nothing ever discernable but shapes in the dark that look like looming figures. I’m never scared, but rather I feel that these things are a natural part of my six-minute journey to the pool. If I do happen to run into a stray person--usually passing on the opposite sidewalk or in a meandering car--I always wonder if I appear as bizarre to them as they do to me. Once I reach the pool the surreal feeling starts to recede. I always try to be the first one there so I can lay in the locker room in silence and try to sink back into the black hole of my consciousness. And then I make my way down to the pool through a dimly lit hallway, hoping that the door is open (some mornings all the doors seem to be locked for no explicable reason), sit on the deck, and jump in.