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The diving board at my neighborhood’s pool looks small now, but at the fifth grade pool party I could have been jumping off a building. The water only appeared here and there in the gaps between the hundred kids. A tiny sea of writhing arms and squirming legs waited for me, all with shouted words streaming from their mouths. Still, they saw me edging forward at the end of the board, and a window opened in the crowd, letting a patch of sunlit water wink up at me. I could not miss that target. If I strayed from my path even slightly, I might brush against the bare skin of a stranger.

That might sound trivial, a second of discomfort at the most, but it terrified me. To me, a moment of contact would poison the entire afternoon. The feeling sticks to me for a while, under my skin. Have you ever had a bug crawl over your leg or hand when you didn’t expect it? Even after it leaves, the tainted feeling of its legs lingers. The fear isn’t like a fear of heights, or of the dark. I’m afraid of that touch the way I’m afraid of a cockroach.

A careful hop sent me through the ring of bodies and into the water. The cool water and the relief slid over me all at once. Within half a second I felt the concrete floor beneath my toes and the nine feet of water hanging over my head, almost twice my height. All of that liquid smothered the sounds of the party instantly; only the blood pulsing in my ears told me I could still hear. The not-quite-darkness put my eyes at ease and all tactile sensation disappeared. That open space, that emptiness and silence held me in a waking dream. I never wanted to leave.

For the first few seconds I hovered in a spotlight, long sunbeams dancing on my body while the rest of the floor lay in shadow. While I stared forward, the darkness crept towards me. I noticed with my first glance down. Looking up, I saw the sun recede, sliding back until the light covered only half my face. A fragment of white glowed down on my right eye for a long moment before the crush of limbs swallowed the opening, leaving me adrift in darkness. I had a solar eclipse all to myself, with what seemed like all of humanity to block out the sun.

Once the gap closed I realized I would have to come up for air. The second I knew I needed it was the second I knew I could not have it. A wall of flesh loomed above me, all kicking legs and wet hair, moving, always moving, with the water and with each other until they linked together into a pale, writhing hive. From below I did not see people, only legs snapping one way or the other, hair clogging the water, hands grabbing, and most of all, skin. They had no faces, no eyes, only meat and breath and warm bodies. My world became a trap, an open mouth I had wandered into only to watch it close before my eyes.

When I realized the gap had closed my heart rate accelerated and my blood pumped hard through my veins, it seemed that all of the air had leached out of my lungs and I felt an overpowering urge to breathe in the water. The water pressure that I hadn’t noticed before returned from nowhere to beat at the blood in my ears until my head pulsed with the force of it all. Every piece of my insides pushed in and out and pulsed and shoved into each other until I couldn’t tell if I was exploding or folding in on myself.

But I couldn’t go up. Going up meant facing the wall of twisted limbs that hovered over me. Going up meant feeling the wriggling bodies pressed against my skin, with all their heat in the churning water. Going up would taint my insides. My mind couldn’t take it, but my body needed it. The two would tear me in half.

It took me about four seconds to decide. Four long, long seconds of my lungs burning and my nose begging me to inhale. Each moment the pressure compounded. The possibility of drowning that had lurked in the back of my mind for a while came back full force. That fear fought against my terror of the mass of meat above, but I could not see reason through the haze of fear. I refused to go up.

In the end it was the chlorine in the water that saved me. With my eyes stretched wide and bare against the electric blue, they stood no chance against the over-chlorinated water at the bottom of the pool. By the end of those four seconds I could hardly see at all. My vision slowly blurred until the limbs that so terrified me became smears of brown and tan. I could face that. Even knowing that they only stood in for the thronging mob, the fire in my lungs finally won out.

I kicked off of the ground with all of the strength that my ten year old legs had. That pumping blood propelled me to the top faster than ever. I needed to move fast, too fast to think, because the thinking would hold me back. It had held me back long enough.

Air and water rushed into my throat together. The relief hit me like a bus but emotions didn’t even exist until I could breathe. I saw only the white of the sun and the violet streaks on my retina it left behind. For the seconds that it took to heave myself out of the crowd and onto the concrete, I couldn’t feel anything but the rush of oxygen into my blood.

As it turned out, I was too out of breath to feel the people against me at all. When I think back on it, I only see that fear I felt nine feet under. I can’t even remember how it felt.

Connecticut home red shade consistent with jonagold apples on the farm a few blocks away, apples which I would pick from the trees, my sisters beside me admiring the smooth exterior of nature’s gift placing them snugly into the green basket

Connecticut home’s backyard, a 15 by 30 foot Russian tundra, aside from the wind silent as the icy moon illuminating unexplored snowscapes, menacing but beautiful in white dresses clashing with frosted horizon freezing temperature falling with the sun wind gusts steel needles unstitching my skin I had to cross this tundra because those wolf howls were luring me towards a distant treeline

Connecticut home’s tv room hours expired away playing Star Wars video games with my dad from the shaggy green chair I would laugh as we failed over and over because the sting of falling short was made level by humor and my dad shouting “those darn robots keep killing us!” was sure to be followed up with a laugh

Creek in the woods behind the connecticut home where my mom would send me to play with my neighbor’s kid with a reminder of the boy who got kidnapped an hour’s drive away so we had to be safe and through the trees we would run like the water through our fingers when we would reach into the flowing brook.

So connecticut home your rugged walls preserving memories, Your tile patio stained with muddy footprints. painting pictures of lost time, I wish I could go back to you.