The Dive
written by: Abdul Mateen
Later, the newspapers would call it a tragedy, the word annoyed him in the short time he had left to be annoyed by anything.
Tragedy implied an arc; tragedy implied a protagonist who had been warned, who had ignored the warning, and who had arrived at his destruction through a series of legible choices. It implied that people watching could see it coming before he did, could lean forward in their seats, could whisper don’t. Nobody had whispered ‘don’t’. That was the part nobody wanted to report.
He had been, just three minutes ago, at the peak of the most successful dive of his career. Not metaphorically, but literally: a ten-metre platform, the national championships, a crowd that had come specifically to watch him and had not been disappointed. His approach had been perfect, his takeoff had been perfect. He had existed for exactly one and a quarter seconds at the top of his arc, in a state that coaches spend careers trying to describe to divers and to students but never quite manage to. That stillness inside motion, that silence that is not silence, that sense of being briefly exempt from the ordinary demands of gravity and time.
He had been, for one and a quarter seconds, the best version of anything he would ever be.
Then his shoulder made a sound. Not a loud sound, that was the other thing. The crowd did not hear it, his coach did not hear it, only he did. A small, interior sound, precise and final, like a single word spoken in a language he was fluent in only in that moment, translating instantly to: It is over now.
He hit the water wrong, he knew it before it wet him. He floated to the surface, for bodies do that. The crowd made a noise, his coach was already at the pool’s edge, already shouting his name, already beginning the long work of figuring out what had happened.
He floated on his back and looked at the ceiling of the aquatics centre. The lights up there were very bright and loud. Championship venues always over-lit their ceilings, he had noticed, as if brightness were the same as importance.
A single thought surfaced, unhurried, almost peaceful: I will spend the rest of my life explaining that I was good, once.
He floated.
The crowd was still making noise, the lights were bright, very, very bright.
