How to Swim

The Philippines is an Asian archipelago that’s composed of a little over 7,000 islands of all shapes and sizes.

My dark-blue, Little Mermaid t-shirt was soaked through with the Pacific’s salt water and my shedding tears. I had just learned to swim.

 Ten minutes earlier I was scooped up in my father’s arms approaching his technique on “teaching one how to swim”. If I knew what I was in for I would’ve been squirming like a worm but as they say, “ignorance is bliss.” I watched my “floaties” disappear into the distance as they were abandoned on the sand. I was in for a surprise of abandonment myself. My father swam me out in the middle of two islands in the Pacific Ocean and left me there. He swam to shore while I idled and cried. When it’s a matter of surviving, somehow instincts kick in and immediately I swam and swam and cried and swam and cried some more. I finally reached the sandy shore and cried even more. I was only five years old.

That day, as scarring as it was, I learned to swim. A year later, of mental recovery, I joined a swim team, swam for U.S.S teams for thirteen years until I got to college and decided to retire. But from one horrific event, swimming helped sculpt my character, it taught me punctuality, ambition, hard work, determination, competition and most of all discipline. The best part of this life defining experience is it’s all on tape.