Happy Birthday. Your thirteenth is important. Your thirteenth is the chance for people to start seeing that you are changing; that important things are happening to you.
Changes have been happening for a few months now. You’ve been taking mental note of the number of hairs you’ve acquired and in what crevices they’ve grown. Hard, dangerous spirals of wire black hair that you had expected to be the color of the blonde on your head. Other things. Your voice walks the octave with an ease you wish would grow difficult. A voice that is grating in your throat and full of razor. Your face too, a sore glazed shine of reds, and ripe whites. You’re growing into an animal. Into a body you feel is no longer yours.
The dreams are the weirdest part of it. They are more involved than even the busiest of your days past. They are moist and distant. In the places of your sleep that only past childhood nightmares had ever been. Full of yielding curves, and a new warmth. Your eyes roll back into the bowl of your head and give you images only a closeness to your brain could bring. Your toes bow and then curl. Your mind surfaces from an inside deeper than you knew you had, to the strain of yellow streetlight, cracked into sharp stars against a black ceiling. Those happy spasms of a deep sweet hurt, entering through the mind and leaving through the toes. They’re beautiful, the kind of dreams you fall back asleep for.
The dreams, more than anything, are like this pool your family has taken you to; a place to remind you of the uniquely warm season in which your birthday lies. It smells half sweet, half an acrid bleach. A chemical flower synthesizing in the sun. The smell is never as strong as when you are actually in the water though, as you are now, lapping at where the mass of water churns most. At where it is all changing.
Next to you is a blacktop parking lot. It is its own pool of searing summer hot, stovetops of cars glitter within it. Adjacent to that sits a dull field of grass made crisp by a chronic midwestern sun. Dandelion heads are weathered and then snowed down in the same windy motion. Mountains too. You trace them with your eyes as they rise and fall, their angles sharpen, crisp definition, and then fade soft. Harsh igneous gashes of rock in the desert of the Midwest.
You can sense time passing as the water around you seems to melt further into a three-o-clock warmth. The water seems to be collecting around you, sensing its own displacement from your feet. It spangles off soft blue. A crude bleach that connects with the chemical haze inside you.
You wanted to come to the pool alone today, compelled by what it means to be thirteen. Your family insisted they come, so they are here. Tanning. Tracking the red suns curve in a sky heated to an eggy film. Their skin stretched sore and whitened by parental sun-screen habits. Your younger brother is here too, his Marco is getting Polo’d, with legs that lunge at blind sound, and eyes cracked to a fraction he insists is zero. Spinning at the hub of a wheel of shrill cries. Twirling to a wet dance under the spotlight of July sun.
At the end of the pool, opposite an unattended life-guard tower is the diving board. It sits just below a mass of clouds you have watched drift into congregation, intent to watch those jumping. You feel as if the tower is staring at you, and act as if it really were, bending your line of sight past it to avoid what would feel like eye contact. Go, do it. Give them proof that you’re not a kid anymore.
Get out of the pool and shake off the blue clean. Your skin a silky chemical surface. Pads of raisin fingers. Your sights chlorine past remains in the blue of your eyes. Knock your head with the heel of your hand. Dislodged, brain-warmed water. There are a lot of people here for this hour. Boys not unlike you in age. Disproportionate, with obvious joints and concaved chests. Bird-like. Girls older than you too. Their suits cling to the gentle juts of hips, and hair once curled into soft springs, is now straight with the weight of water. Swells and curves ride low over delicate hips. Skin tanned. Get out now and do it.
The line that is forming behind the diving board moves with rhythm. Like breathing. Like a machine. People of every age form it, some many birthdays ahead. The woman in front of you now wears a suit that seems overfilled. Acrylic blue veins are dense across the backs of her cheese white thighs. Her suit is full of her. A man with the tension of a face approaching middle-age is behind you too, escorting his five-year old daughter. Her face engorged by the wonder-woman goggles she has squeezed across her forehead.
Almost everybody looks by themselves in the line. Few talk, and when they do, it’s only brief. Always only when necessary. A line that is more like a braid of crossed arms, tight with an agreed sense of insecurity. People chilled by the rising wind against the blue bead constellations of their backs and shoulders.
The board is still high overhead, only partially visible. It’s sound is just as menacing as the look of it. The rumbling of a board that cracks back into plastic sturdiness after each leap. Then a diver, visible for only a few contained feet. An exclamation point of foam. The awkward, scattered claps produced out a collective feeling that something has just been performed. Then a tank healed clean, back to summer crystal. The whole movement is systolic, one jumps another moves forward then the tank is re-healed smooth again.
Halfway up, the radio is loudest here. There’s that hum of thinning, enervating pop-music. People in the concession line are now just a collection of aerial dots that belong to the people with height. Your brother, caped in cotton. Your father slumped into the half-consciousness that proper tanning sessions require. Your mother, now swatting away a bee that appears motionless, a savory blur, hanging over the mouth of her sweet tea. All can be seen. The whole thing.
You’re close now. The woman in front of you is standing at the end of the board. She pauses without looking out, and initiates her jump. She’s a part of it now, a part of something that requires blindness. Her weight makes the board bend low as if it doesn’t want her, then in the speed of a blur that is her own body is convulsed. Tossed into her little arc. Listen. She enters a brief world without sound. Somehow, she’s in the same place you are. A place between places. Her arms inscribe those circles as her toes bow and then meet the water. And for only a moment, the column of air her weight makes in the pool is visible. A moment before the water’s realization that there is an absence. An odd human-sized displacement where part of it once was and all that is left is a world working to catch up.
It’s your turn now. Climb out onto the board. A board that stretches into a blurry nothingness. A rough white fiberglass surface meant to keep you from slipping off. It feels weird, how the board bends beyond its parallel understanding with the surface of the pool the further you walk out. How once the ballet of movement pauses, the whole thing is reconfirmed into a glass. Into something that is solid without time.
Look outwards. The board cuts the world into something without motion. Without time. A star in the first year of its billion, while the thing below you moves as fast as life. You could stay here forever. In this place that the boards dissection has made for you, blocking out the blue vacuum its own length keeps you from seeing. Vibrating so fast inside you start to float without movement, like a bee over sweet tea.
Hey kid. Everyone is watching. You have bothered this background rhythm many didn’t know existed until it was gone. That soothe of blindness. A concern in the crowd spreads as fast as your time had left you. All the time that is no longer yours. Your mother looks to where you once were and then makes a visor of her hand. Your father stirs with a great jiggle at the waist as he juts his arm outward, attempting to shift his weight. People trace the radial line of your body upwards, until your head meets the center of a great patch of reddening sun.
Look down. Two black spots crown the edges of your feet. The abrasion of skin from all the violent jumps before you. Tender bits of flesh to which your own will soon add a layer of blackness.
The pool seems to move with the sun, now full of hard coins of light, cracking the pools bottom into something from a dream. Coins heavy, in the pockets of your suit. Flip them all, heads and tails but somehow neither. Did you think things over? Yes and no. Disappear into a well of time. Hey kid, are you okay?
The height is not the problem. How are you to know that once you jump the pool won’t disappear from underneath you? Or that anything will be same once you’re down there.
It won’t be. Watch how fast it changes. How quick time is to claim the things it makes. The board will nod and you will go. The eyes of those watching will cross a cloud-stained sky. Long shards of light from the hearts of sad stars emptying into a world that is yours. Step out and disappear forever. Happy birthday.