The first time I nearly got myself killed swimming was at an empty dock, I meant to race my friend to a concrete platform jutting out of the ocean. He was thirteen and I was twelve. We’d just spent the day out on his father’s boat, and turned in before the weather caught us. We were brave, we thought, dropping into the swell with the storm still hanging way out on the horizon.

My arms wheeled in the water. I had a tough time keeping my head above the surface, above the rough, churning water in the bay. By the time I got on top of the structure, they were swollen taut. In the minute or two it took us to swim our way over and climb the ladder, the sky had shifted. Roiling dark clouds shoved in like dirt, like they’d been waiting for us to try it to fuck us up and ruin it.

We stood there shivering, my friend and I, on the concrete column that stuck out of the water some ten feet, in the empty marina, in our baggy, heavy, soaked swim trunks. We’d dared each other to jump, we’d made it a performance, and now we had to deliver, otherwise choke on our pride.

The rough water had beaten us up. My friend was winded and wide-eyed. Our parents, grandparents, and a group of four strangers who’d watched us dive in, back when it was fun, stood where we left them, waving and shouting, cheering us on from the shore.

Or so I thought. Were they saying, “won’t jump?” I cupped my ear and strained to hear. “Sharp in the water.” What did that mean? The ocean spray stung me, miserable. My eyes watered.

As soon as he caught his breath, without hesitation my friend jumped inelegantly back into the chop and swam hard. I remember thinking that I would likely die, and choosing to dive headfirst anyway, even though I’d never done it before. I trembled. The cartoonishly ominous, fast-moving storm’s dark clouds, burbling and threatening lightning, opened like a big, fanged mouth overhead. I toppled over the edge with too much rotation, slamming against the water’s surface on my back. All the air from my lungs got squeezed out and saltwater shot up my nose.

It’s so rare to meet one’s real limit at that age. My body had only ever done almost everything I’d wanted. Now I was breathing and kicking and reaching, but the waves grew and crashed over my head, and I floundered.

Well, I thought, this is how it happens. This is it. I’ll be the great, inevitable tragedy of my family. Dead at twelve, taken by the sea.

“It happened just like that,” they would say. “He was there and then he wasn’t.”

Later, swaddled in a beach towel, in the back of the family van, on our way home, we had a good laugh: they weren’t cheering us on, the adults, they were trying to tell us not to jump. There were sharks in the water, probably after the snook and snapper that had come in closer to shore, having sensed the coming storm.

We had no idea. I only knew to keep moving. Gasping, fighting to hold my head above water, I thought a secret prayer, “God, if you let me live, I’ll be happy from now on.” My friend crashed and strode ahead of me until, halfway, he turned around and stopped, treading until I caught up, when he put his arm around me.

When we were close, he helped me up the ladder. My hands could hardly wrap around the rungs. I was shaking and shuddering as the wind whipped around us. When I reached the top, Dad took my arm and grabbed me out, laughing at the two of us. The whole time, a dozen or so bull sharks had been gliding idly nearby, swimming circles beneath us, close enough to touch us, or for us to touch them.

***

The second time, one warm June night when I was twenty-three, I went swimming alone, drunk, in the Gulf Sea at two in the morning. I looked up and down the beach, empty but for the faint red of the Sea Turtle Patrol’s four-wheeler taillights.

A tranquil, cloudless night—once my eyes adjusted, I could see a hundred faint flecks between every blinking star, like the veil of sky had been lifted and I was seeing space as it is for the first time. The moon shone and lit a brilliant lane across the ocean’s surface, from the horizon to the lapping water’s edge, where inch-high waves rolled gently over themselves, smacking the wet, packed sand like a kiss, and I took off all my clothes.

With every step, wading into the buoyant, empty dark, I found myself surrounded by bioluminescent plankton. I would’ve imagined that they were slimy, which wasn’t the case. It was like nothing. I couldn’t feel my body—that’s what temperature the water was. Same as me. The amniotic ocean, aglitter and speckled, glimmering alien green.

They exploded like fireworks when I twirled and threw my body around. Me and the night and the sprite-like living jewels. Every motion, something dazzling. Me and the sea alone, so alive in the empty dark.

I swam until I had to catch my breath. I would’ve gone farther, but I kept getting caught in nets of seaweed that tangled around my ankles. Even from afar, the island’s light at night glowed altogether coral orange in a foggy band, and it was completely quiet but for the pull and shush of the receding waves.

Only the next morning I heard the news that at five, after my swim but shortly before the sunrise, a father had dived after his child daughter, caught in a riptide, and the two of them vanished.

It can happen just like that. No screaming, no crying.

Nobody can keep their head above water forever. When I was too tired to tread any longer, I strode out toward my clothes, the shadow of a heap, guided by the moon. I dressed quickly, catching a chill from the breeze. I pulled my shirt over my head and looked up the berm, where a mother sea turtle, like a familiar morning commuter, was sliding out of the beachgrass. Me, headed home, she, back to the sea. 

At first, I found it amusing, looking deep into the empty beauty of those wide, black eyes on the beach. How strange and supernatural they seemed, gleaming like polished stones, reflecting the flickering of the faraway lights that formed the constellations.

I was never scared of the dark, or solitude, or small spaces, or the open ocean, or going to sleep and not waking up, because it didn’t occur to me to think of my life as precious, or a shame to waste. But in that moment, I found that I couldn’t look away, and became suddenly aware of the many miles of dirt and stone beneath me, and I imagined a line straight through the other side and out into the sprawling, expanding infinity of space, the living, growing, swirling sprawl of everything that existed beyond my little world, and I could not get dry enough, or warm enough, or calm enough to stop from trembling.