History as Fiction -- Elizabeth

               Last Friday was the Uni swim team's last day of practice at the Urbana Indoor Aquatic Center, and we were all incredibly happy about that because UIAC is an excruciatingly disgusting location to have practice at. The water is never a normal temperature, the items lurking at the bottom are not limited to items a pool should normally contain, and there’s a particular scent, indescribable but distinctively nauseating, that permeates the entire facility. Not only can you smell it every time you take a breath, you can almost feel it, too, seeping into your lungs and hair the entire time you’re in the water. The second you get out, it’s a race against time to get home and be able to wash off the crust -- of chlorine, that aforementioned mysterious smell, and other things it's best not to contemplate -- that has plastered itself onto you. You might be tempted to try and grab a shower in the pool locker room, but don’t: that’ll only make it worse.              Before

               It was supposed to be. I’ve been screaming at myself to write some kind of a draft of that essay since August and until this Monday I had literally nothing. Making it into a blog post gave me a deadline, which is what I needed. Now I have 1200 words written in a Google doc, which, if you do the math, could be two complete iterations of the eventual essay. But really it’s still a mess: two introductions, both of which were richly, eloquently, and unnecessarily embroidered and thus 250 words long and had to be cut, and seven body paragraphs when only four could possibly fit in the real thing and none of them remotely make sense. There’s no hint of a conclusion yet. I keep hitting 650 words halfway through the story and without making any of the point I’m trying to get across.               This is the story I’m trying to tell. During the first shift I ever worked as a lifeguard, I failed three consecutive VRTs -- “victim recognition training,” or practice saves -- whic