MY DAD TELLS A STORY about my mom. They were swimming together in Lake Michigan, after the sun had just set, so there were no lifeguards, and they could swim out to the buoys that marked the end of the sandbar. My mom swam out ahead of him, and then stopped swimming forward, treading water, far past the point where her feet could touch the bottom. She was staring at the horizon. My dad says he saw something in her eyes, some kind of suicidal resignation, and had to pull her back toward shore. This story was used to illustrate the depths of what we (he and I) don’t understand about my mother.

I can understand this better than most things about my mom. When I want to be alone, I close my eyes and imagine myself plunging into a pool. Other people have a way of inhabiting my mind. I get their voices, and lines from my conversations with them, lodged in a nook, providing voice-over for everything that happens to me. Under the surface, with the heaviness of water on all sides, it is impossible to imagine myself combined with someone else. My mind, temporarily, unmerges. The cost of the clarity found in this solitude is nihilism: a recognition of death—from the feeling of drowning—and the sense that everything is arbitrary. From this, I derive a perverse sense of power, as if all the details of my life are laid out in front of me like a deck of cards, which I have the power to reshuffle. Last night, I turned my back to Oliver and imagined myself plunging.