It was always warm in my dreams.
In this one, the sun is relentless, beating down on our faces. White styrofoam boards, yellow shoulder floats, wrinkled fingers, little red buntings, unhygienic fish balls from itinerant hawkers, the smell of chlorine; we are all kids again at the swimming pool.
It was a Sunday, I think. A little boy's memory is always hazy and inaccurate, like peering through a window pane on a rainy bus ride home from school. Yes, it should be a Sunday because that's the only time when my mother didn't have to work in the mornings for the pittance she gets. But I never made any sense of her work until I grew up. And since I'm only a kid in this one, it may or may not be a Sunday, depending on how you look at it.
On this Sunday, the pool was packed with children of all shapes and sizes (you see, in the 1980s, some parents seriously pondered the prospect of Singapore sinking as an island, and so it became a parental responsibility to induct their offspring in the arts of water treading in the event of national disaster). Some were playing with water, others on floats, while the bigger boys and girls were either doing laps up and down in their brightly colored swimming costumes or dunking their friends.
"When will I get goggles?" I asked my mother, out of the blue.
"When you pass the swimming test," she returned, her stern look unwavering.
"Why can't I get one now? Sister has one already and its not fair."
Her lips moved in reply, but all I could hear was white noise in this dream.
I looked hard at her as she straightened the hem of the swimming cap and adjusted my trunks. She's seated in front of me, her hair is black again and the skin of her arms still smooth. But because the sun is either too bright or maybe I can't remember her youthful visage anymore, I could never fully visualize the image of my mother's younger self. Like a faceless stranger lost amidst the droning crowd, the passage of time smudges our memories of people, even those dearest to us, reducing them to unreliable figments of pale white static.
My thoughts snapped with the sharp toot from the coach's whistle, as the children gathered around that tanned body dressed only in skimpy shorts and ray-bans. In the distance, protective parents sip tea in the shade, fanning away the heat as they thumb through their novels and newspapers, occasionally lifting their heads to check on their children.
"Now go," she said with a quick pat on my head.
With that, I sprang around and leapt into the shimmering pool. My body feels light once again, and the calm water surface comes alive with white ripples as I plunge into its vast, cooling expanse. Half-imagining myself as some intrepid diver venturing into unknown depths, I feel the resistance of water as I waddle through the glistening pool towards the coach for another boring swimming lesson. Breathe in, arm strokes, feet paddle, breath out. I hate my Sundays as a boy.
I closed my eyes and repeated the movements until a dull heaviness set in, when everything starts to be pulled back, and suddenly I am awake from my dream. The cold pillow had slight trails of wetness, as if the dream had pulled back some of those forgotten swimming pool Sundays of my childhood.
Instead, they were tears shed for lost time.
There was a dull ache in my chest as I got out of the darkness to check the clock. It's four in the morning. I went to her room and ran my fingers down her forearms to feel the deep lines of labour on her skin. Her eyelids quiver, but she stays soundly asleep.
The smell of chlorine and those goggles we couldn't afford; they seemed so distant and unimportant now as I watched her sleep.
