"HOW NOT TO DROWN" by ELSA VALMIDIANO

From The Beginning of Leaving by Elsa Valmidiano

(Querencia Press, 2023)

 

 

HOW NOT TO DROWN

by Elsa Valmidiano

 

 

I.

 

I didn’t learn to swim until I was sixteen. I grew up twenty minutes from the ocean, but it doesn’t mean you know.

 

The blood of island people runs through my veins. Still, it doesn’t mean you know.

 

Women in my family had grown up by the ocean. Still, they didn’t know.

 

Why not? you ask.

 

Women couldn’t.

 

Just as they couldn’t ride bikes as my mother told me, My Lola said girls who rode bikes broke their hymens, and if your hymen was broken, a man would never want you.

 

Maybe the ocean was seen as sensual. The same exhilaration felt during orgasm. Again, another belief orgasms were not meant for women.

 

Swim. Now. I command myself as I snorkel in Fiji-Sangat-Leyte-Maui-Oahu-Kauai-Menjangan-Vieques.

 

Don’t hyperventilate. Don’t question the physics.

 

And yet the questions still flood—How is it possible to stay afloat?

 

Brightly colored fish swim past my fingers, temporarily reminding me what I have always known in the womb.

 

After a day of work in San Francisco while waiting for the bus, I’d imagine swimming to the tops of skyscrapers, when I would suddenly think of drowning—the waters closing in like an infestation of ants.

 

I remind myself, You know how.

 

II.

 

I learned to swim at sixteen, which may be considered not that late, but I was old enough that the fear of water seeped deep into my psyche than if I were to have learned at seven or eight when everyone else had learned. I learned to ride a bike at twelve when everyone else had learned at five. With learning to bike, I was not so afraid. With swimming, I can never shake the fear of drowning that greets me when I first step into water, and it takes rational reminding that swimming is an act of physics—I will not drown if I just swim as I have learned all of those decades ago.

 

My mother could only dream of swimming.

 

My mother eventually learned to swim at forty-nine. Fear, still there. For both of us.

 

Throughout college and law school, which amounted to seven years total, I swam at least three to four times a week to every weekend to almost every night at one point, swimming the freestyle for two straight hours without pause—to shake the fear of water, to build my stamina in it. In the deep end with each stroke, I’d stare at the pool floor ten feet below as if I were flying. Even the lifeguard would take notice and marvel at my endurance when I’d finally climb out of the pool and submerge myself in the jacuzzi, my muscles melting in the heat and steam, transforming from frightened human to peaceful jellyfish.

 

You are such a good swimmer with good form, but what does praise matter when the fear of drowning dictates first?

 

III.

 

At forty-four while visiting a Pinay sister in The Bahamas, she would simply tell me to speak with the ancestors while we swam. This ancestral communication should have come as second nature to me. Instead, she switched the light on in my brain. My Pinay sister could not ride a bike, but she could swim in open water for miles.

 

There’s a sadness here amidst the beauty. Do you feel it?

 

The blood of island ancestors ran through both our veins. My Pinay sister, having grown up a Diasporic child in The Bahamas, told me of the Lukku-Cairi’s absence, a resounding mourning echo between land and sea. She reminded me that the turquoise waters were never just paradise but a final resting place, where slave ships had discarded three million Africans into this very sea. Our own Filipino ancestors circumnavigated the world as slaves on Spanish galleon ships. And now, four hundred and thirty-five years later, we Diasporic granddaughters were swimming in their space.

 

Please, ancestors, she implored as she swam half a mile out to explore a rock in the middle of the sea.

 

Please, ancestors, I implored when the age-old fear suddenly cut me loose.

 

The next morning while snorkeling, I spent a peaceful minute treading by myself, not caring at all about the fish, but I calmly watched the swaying surface of the water as I felt, for once, a gentle immersion that accepted me wholly in return.

 

 

*****

 

Philippine-born and LA-raised, Elsa Valmidiano is an award-winning Ilocana-American essayist and poet who currently resides in Oakland. Her debut essay collection from New Rivers Press, We Are No Longer Babaylan, was an Editors’ Choice selection from their Many Voices Project competition in Prose. Her second essay collection, The Beginning of Leaving, is from Querencia Press in Summer 2023. Her essay collections have been featured and reviewed in RHINO, Rain Taxi, Pacific Daily News, Women Who Submit, Tiny Spoon, Anti-Heroin Chic, Marías at Sampaguitas, and The Halo-Halo Review. Her third book, which will be her debut poetry collection, Giving Birth in a Time of War, is forthcoming from Jaded Ibis Press in Spring 2025. Valmidiano’s work is widely published in journals and anthologies. For more information, visit her website slicingtomatoes.com.