The story
Until I was thirty, I could not swim.
When I was seven, I fell into a river and someone pulled me out.
After that I was afraid of deep water for more than twenty years.
I avoided swimming pools, beaches and boats.
Then a friend invited me to a lake for her birthday.
Everybody swam and I sat on the grass alone.
That evening I searched for swimming lessons for adults.
At my first lesson I was the oldest person in the group by ten years.
The teacher did not ask me to swim. She asked me to put my face in the water.
That took me three lessons.
After two months I could swim from one side of the pool to the other.
It was twenty-five metres, and it felt like a marathon.
Nobody clapped, because nobody else knew what it meant.
But I sat on the side of the pool and could not stop smiling.