I was stuck, at the bottom of the deep end. Diving in had been no problem, letting the chilly fingers of the water take their grip on me as I plunged and flippered toward that ten cent piece on the bottom, but then I got there and everything came to a halt. I didn’t know how to get back. As one motivational speaker I heard once said – “one day I decided to leave the podium- but then I had to work out how to get back”.

I was immobile, my limbs seemed to be frozen and my lungs were starting to hurt- nothing was occuring to me to fix this situation. It was then that the flashbacks started. God! I was only nine, but my life litteraly started peeling away before my eyes, incidents and accidents and encounters were spinning by at super speed, yet each one was taking a moment to let me indulge in the sense of it. For example making a snow castle in the middle of the soccer pitch, just the briefest lightning bolt iilluminating the screen in my mind, but I sensed the cold coming through my mittens, tasted the melting snow in my mouth, felt that chily wind biting through my anorach.

Still stuck, another part of my brain was hoping someone would come and rescue me- and maybe that’s what happened, I’m thinking about it now and I seem to have flashed back to that point where someone – one of my friends? did indeed dive in and push me up or drag me or something. Somehow I had been mesmerised by the movie reel that had been firing off in my mind, but as soon as I was out of the water dripping free the real panic hit me, the ‘might have been’ scenario. Might have been me floating to the top in need of resuscitation. Sure wish I knew how to swim… still, but obviously this is not a huge wish as I never do anything about it- or actually go swimming or have much at all to do with water for that matter, It has unpleasant memories.