January 2025, at a café which claims to be a place where its not
When I swim in the rain, I find myself wondering, 'How wet is it physically possible to get?'.
I love the way the rain patters on the water around me, how it becomes muted when I go under and how it hits the top of my head when I resurface again. There's also a strange fun in trying to find a place to keep your clothes dry.
There's a place I run to in the summers in Oslo to go swimming. My days start and end late so I have usually found myself there at ten or eleven at night. Sometimes there's a gentle summer rain, almost a light mist of countless droplets that you move into like a thick, silky vapor. There's no one there that late at night usually so I have the whole place to myself and the family of ducks.
There's a tree next to the stream that fills the dam I swim in. I usually hang my clothes in the branches of the tree when it rains. On a sunny day last year my best friend and I jumped in here. It was the first clear day after a week of rain and the water was white with energy. We threw ourselves in and were dragged with enough speed to make us laugh. I think of that moment in the solitude of the rainy days.
When I was younger I asked my uncle in Norway how people worked in construction in Bergen if it rained for almost a month at a time. He smiled in confusion and said that they just work, why wouldn't they? It took a while for me to understand that rain is not like rain in Malaysia where each droplet feels like a bucket and each downpour is so cataclysmic that there's nothing to do but to shelter.
When I'm in Malaysia I am careful make sure there's no risk of lightning before plunging in. They say it's too cold to swim at night but I think it's nice and warm especially after swimming in snowy Tromsø. I just let myself be swallowed up and I sit at the bottom feeling my breath expire before swimming up to the surface and drowning in the cacaphony.