Write from what you know…
I feel like a girl who has been taking swim lessons her whole life.
She’s had a myriad of instructors, each highly qualified - years of experience, they said.
They demonstrated all the strokes - free, breast, butterfly, back - from the side of the pool.
Not quite, they might say or You’ve almost got it!
They were so incredibly smart.
She bobbed in the water, looking up - always up - to watch them, mimic them, try to make them proud.
The girl had so much to learn. They had so much to teach.
She gulped a lot of water.
She had to cling to the sides of the pool.
She cried out for a flotation device several times.
But she did it - she learned to swim.
And then, it happened. The news started trickling in.
The girl would not, could not, believe it.
Her instructors were dead - almost all of them.
But how they died - it was unthinkable.
They drowned.
In an inch of water.
They had spent so long teaching, showing others the way, that no one thought to look closer…could they actually perform in water what they confidently asserted on dry ground?
The girl became afraid.
Everything felt false, unreliable.
There is grief, yes, but stranger still is the dizzying sense that reality is not real.
How had the very thing her instructors taught her to love become the weapon that killed them?