Watched

Chapter 1: My Life Before You

*River*

Before I met you, my life wasn't really normal. So I guess I shouldn't have been surprised at what happened after I met you. Life is what it is. You do the best with what you've been given.

It's strange, but I've always loved the water. For as long as I can remember, I've wanted to do nothing but swim. My mom used to say I was part mermaid. When I was a toddler, I figured out how to open the latch on the screen door so I could run out and and splash in the puddles during a rainstorm. My mom told me that she panicked for about half an hour before she found me happily splashing in a puddle out in our driveway.

When I was a little older, my parents bought a pool. Nothing huge or fancy, but it was deep enough that my brother Nolan and I could paddle around in it during the hot summer days. After my parents divorced when I was eight, my mom refused to take care of the pool anymore, and it gradually rotted away.

Mom fell into a deep depression after Dad left. I didn't understand it then. All I knew at the time was that it seemed like she hated Nolan and me almost as much as she hated Dad. She couldn't take care of anything anymore – not the house, not the pool, not us, not even herself. Her brother, our uncle Brandon, eventually moved in to help us out because my mom just wasn't getting the job done.

My grandma, my mother's mom, lived just down the street. Nolan and I were always close to her. After Dad left, we spent a lot of time there. Grandma knew we needed her, and she liked to be needed. She became like a surrogate mother to us.

The summer after he moved in, Uncle Brandon let Nolan and me ride our bikes to the Tanner Park public pool. Nolan was thirteen, after all, and I was mature for a nine-year-old. Uncle Brandon knew I was an excellent swimmer and that the lifeguard at the pool was very attentive.

Swimming was my way to escape after Dad left and after Mom checked out, emotionally speaking. I didn't know exactly know how to process those horrible feelings I was having. I was hurt and angry, but I couldn't identify those emotions at such at the time. I felt alone, and I just really disliked being at home because it was depressing. Clearly Dad hadn't wanted us because he just up and left with his girlfriend from high school. Mom didn't seem like she wanted us either. And Uncle Brandon was awesome, but he worked two jobs to support all of us, so he wasn't around much. So it was the pool or Grandma's house. Most of the time, we only went home to sleep.

I guess it's no coincidence that I was named River. Whenever I was in the water, I felt as if I was a part of it. Like there was no separation between myself and the fluid that absorbed my form. When I moved fast enough, I felt like a river rushing out to sea. When I practiced my butterfly strokes, I imagined that I was white water, crashing over rocks in the mighty rapids. Sometimes, I just floated and envisioned myself as a meandering stream.

I loved the feeling of the water as it would glide over my body. I couldn't hear anything else. I couldn't see anything but blue, either the blue of the sky or the blue of the pool. I was alone with my thoughts and my breathing. Even before I joined a swim team, I taught myself almost every stroke there was. I checked out books from the library on swimming techniques, or I researched swimming strokes on the internet when our cable bill was actually paid, which wasn't very often.

At one point, when I was about thirteen, my mom went to a hospital for several months, and Uncle Brandon made Nolan and me talk to a counselor. Maybe it helped. I don't remember much about it, except that I found it irritating that some nerdy looking old guy wanted me to tell him about my “feelings.” We went every week for a while, but then we stopped going. I don't remember why.

However, when I was older, I found myself back in counseling. Actually, the second time around, it was called therapy, but it's all the same in my mind. I was 14 and I desperately needed someone to talk to. Grandma died that summer and I was completely lost. To make matters worse, that was the summer I got my period. Yeah, I was kind of a late bloomer, and because of my mom's virtual absence in my life, I had no idea how to deal with a period or how often I should expect it. I'm thankful that at least I knew what it was. And I knew enough to ask Uncle Brandon to buy me some supplies. He bought me gigantic pads that felt like diapers. I was too embarrassed to ask him to buy tampons, and I had no idea how to use them anyway. So I didn't swim a lot that summer, because even if I wasn't having my period, I wasn't sure when it would come back because there was no one to tell me how that worked. And I couldn't go to my Grandma's house anymore. 

Nolan and I had always been close, but that was also the summer that he was getting ready for college. He tried to be there for me, but he was working like crazy to save money for college so that he would only have to work part-time, or not at all, when college started in the fall.

I had never felt more alone than that summer. So I guess maybe I got depressed like my mom. But my therapist never came right out and called it depression.

That fall, my freshman year in high school, I decided to join the swim team. And I decided to swallow my pride and ask the swim coach if she could tell me how to use a tampon. She printed out something from Google and gave it to me. From then on, Coach Freeman became my mentor, the closest thing I would have to a mom during my teenage years. I spent as much time as I could at the high school swimming pool. I helped Coach Freeman with the swim equipment every day. We talked a lot, and sometimes she just let me swim while she put grades into the computer, since she was a teacher at our school, too.

I kept seeing my therapist throughout my freshman year, but eventually I realized that swimming was more therapeutic for me than talking. So, at the end of that year, I convinced Uncle Brandon that I didn't need therapy anymore, and my mom was actually doing much better, too. She came home from the hospital and even got a part-time job.

In fact, my mom was doing so well that she wanted to take a vacation with us. She wanted to return to my Grandma's hometown of Leigh-on-Sea in England. She felt like it would give her “closure” after Grandma's death, to visit the place that had only given her joy when she was a little girl.

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The picture on the side is young River, about the age she was when her father left.