I hauled myself up the last slippery stone step,

and sat on top of the cliff - a cliff so small perhaps you would want to call it a ledge instead.

I shivered from the brief dip in the cold of the water. I had to endure the short swim to get across to climb the ledge as it was on the other side of the fall, but just then the sun came from behind the clouds and shone down onto the waters and through the trees to reach my body and it warmed me right up. My initial thought was to do a dive once I got onto the ledge but I changed my mind because it looked far too high and I wasn’t confident that I could launch myself far enough to land in the middle of the water instead of just falling in a vertical splat onto the rocks below.

Sitting down, I took off my goggles, to see the world in its rightful colours instead of through the tinted dark plastic. This meant that I was back to blurry vision though, the goggles were ones with power because I hated having to swim in a quarter-blind state. But once they were off, bright and vivid colours swam before my eyes. The water glittered like an emerald and sapphire liquid in the golden sunlight, and my blurry vision turned this into a soft watercolour painting, with shimmering white bokeh blinking and winking at me across the water. It was a moment of serenity that I couldn’t remember feeling for a long while.

The club president was a few feet away from me with his 7d, taking photos. And usually I would be quite glad to have a camera with me but I didn’t have a waterproof bag to carry it with me for the swim. Strangely content with just sitting there hugging my knees, I watched the rest of them go splash and heard their laughter ringing across the forest. It was lovely.

Unfortunately I had to get off at some point, and since I couldn’t gather the courage to jump I had to climb back down the ledge like a defeated old tortoise. 

The next day I did jump though, 3 times at that! It was blastedly good, although the whole water up your nose thing isn’t really that much of a hoohaa if you ask me.

  1. ellagicacid-inked posted this