From the Anthology
Pandemic Reflections: Five Years Later
Water scatters morning sunshine and its pieces brighten the bottom of the pool. One stroke. I stretch my right arm toward the glittering fragment of light, kicking gently waving water. When the warmth of sunshine slips away from my hand, I stretch another arm. Another stroke. Glide further.
My four-year-old face was wet with tears and saliva when I could not find my mom after waking up from a nap. I must not have been alone for a while, but I felt breathless as if water was filling up in the little room. My mom hurriedly came into the house to find me almost suffocating myself with the wet pillow. When she lifted and hugged me tightly, the breeze that followed her dried my face. I was safely out of the water. She used to say, I was so light that even a little wave of water could push me away. I never learned how to swim.
I began to take a swim class for adults when the pandemic dried me up. Right before the COVID lockdown fell upon us, my partner was about to settle on his new full-time job. In the virtual, working-from-home environment, he struggled to prove himself available and capable even when his effort was only obvious at home. Our seven-year-old found an endless labyrinth of a tantalizing glimpse of new pleasure on YouTube. In the cycle of cooking, cleaning, and laundering while teaching online, I saw myself as such a failure. Then, my period stopped. I was only forty. My gynecologist showed me the test result of follicle-stimulating hormone level, jokingly saying, “Certainly you are menopausal, and you can swim without worrying about period!”
We were in the warm, shallow pool at a local recreation center in the late evening hours. The swim instructor, Nancy, a recently retired counsellor, called me baby. My two classmates warmly giggled whenever the instructor made fun of my youth because they were far older than her. Liz, who already had three grown-up grandchildren, talked about the incident that made her afraid of water seventy years ago. Viraj came much earlier to and left late after the lesson to practice, claiming that he had taken the same class three times before and might have to do even more. He was a slow walker but was too fast in the water to maintain his posture. And me – barely floating in my fight with water. The pale blue pool water wrapped me up and grabbed me down quickly when I tried to keep my head above water for air.
The pandemic compelled me to accept inevitable losses. When COVID kept us apart, I lost the friendship that I had believed as a guiding light in this chosen country. She abruptly behaved as if I were not there even when in-person meetings at work resumed, and I missed a chance to ask her because I was not supposed to exist in her mind. After he got the virus, my dad’s memory began to slowly slip away. He was quiet when I flew on a 17-hour flight to see him upon my mother's urgent call. He didn’t want me to notice he could not remember clearly. I mourned the loss of those who I loved, but I shouldn’t call it loss as they are still here with me. This grief needs another name because this feeling comes not from loss but from poignant metamorphosis of being.
I placed a buoy looking like a butternut squash between my thighs. It kept me floating, as my legs tightly held it. I started to flutter-kick, feeling my body slowly gliding. Suddenly, the buoy slipped away from the legs sleek with water. I jerked downward as if I could have walked in the pool. But it seemed unreachable – too deep, too far, and too blue. Holding my breath, I stopped kicking. A gulp of water rushed into my mouth when I tried to gasp. The bottom circled. The black streak at the pool’s bottom swerved. Then, the water. It pushed me to the surface of the pool. After breathlessly coming to a ladder, I realized I was only in the four-foot-deep pool. That was the moment when I learned how to float.
My new office has a window wall that shows a bush of trees. The room is located in the hallway filled with sunlight. The pandemic was declared to be over, although many still died and remained disabled from the virus. People gathered in person in a closed space to celebrate “returning to normal,” as if they did not notice those who never came back. My masked face blushed when people walked away from me without greetings. They might have thought I was sick – or just a dork. When I asked for relocation at work, my boss hesitantly pointed out a hallway room, which as a one-time storage had been unoccupied, unheated, and uncleaned for a few years. As soon as I entered the room, it smelled as empty as chlorinated pool water. I knew this would be my own space.
“Baby, you are a fast learner,” cheerfully claimed Nancy. It was three weeks after I practiced swimming every early morning and late evening when the pool was empty. My daughter, already advanced in swimming, joined me many evenings. Circling around me standing in the middle of the pool, she played with water. Flapping, flipping, fluttering, dashing into, and emerging on the surface. Pulling my arms to a deeper spot, she said, “If you can float, it doesn’t matter how deep water is.” I lifted my feet, letting her lead me to the other side of the pool.
One stroke. I hear busy bubbles constantly popping and rising. My torso hits glittering sunshine on the surface, pushing forward in the water. Another stroke. My body glides into the fissure of light that gracefully blends my vestige with water behind me.
Jewon Woo is a professor of English at Lorain County Community College, teaching literatures and humanities. She was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea and came to the U.S. to study American literature. Other than teaching and writing, she loves to spend time with her partner (one-time lover of Virginia Woolf), her daughter, and Lucy the cat.
