My eyes closed, the hypnotic rasping of the ocean waves rinses from my mind any coherent thoughts, leaving me with simply half-formed words like "mimosa" and "exfoliation" floating lazily around in my subconscious. The gritty sand sticks to the back of my legs, momentarily making me ponder the effects that it will have on my sorry attempt for a tan, before the thought sinks back into nothingness. The warmth of the sun makes my skin lightly tingle. As I continue to lay there, with all the energy of a comatose slug, the tingle slowly becomes a prickling sensation, and not moments later my whole body twitches as the prickling transforms into a deep burn, as if someone had thrown freshly fried bacon onto my back. I can almost hear my skin sizzling. Obviously, time to flip.
I open my eyes and sit up. The iridescent, glowing blue of the ocean and the sky are barely distinguishable hues on the horizon, and for a moment I'm not sure which way is up. The green fronds of the palm trees sway softly to the beat of the ever-present folding of the waves. I look over and see my mom, wearing only her bikini, her sunhat perched on top of her mass of curling, blonde hair. She seems just as hypnotized by the ocean's lullaby as I do. She catches my eye and smile lazily at each other.
Suddenly I can see my mom has an idea, and I gaze warily at her as she stands up and shakes herself off. I am still feeling as if I may be sleeping, or high, but her sense of purpose has made my body decide that it may be time to come back to earth and perhaps DO something with my day. I'm not sure how I feel about this.
"What are you doing?" I ask her, gazing up at her silhouette against the blindingly blue sky. In response, she bends down to pick something up, and when she straightens, I can see that she is holding two snorkeling masks. A sense of foreboding envelops me, but I try to ignore it and smile anyways. I have only snorkeled once in my life, many years ago, and I don't even remember how it ended. I may not have snorkeled at all; perhaps I imagined it. My mom has been suggesting a snorkeling adventure ever since I showed up at her house a few days ago, so I figure the moment has come. Embrace it.
We walk down to the water and she hands me one of the masks, with snorkel attached. I fumble around with it in my hands for a few moments, not even sure how to hold the damned thing without the strap getting in my way, or the snorkel falling over on top of the mask. It is a ridiculously complicated thing that my still sun-buzzed mind can barely wrap itself around.
"First," my mom instructs, "spit in the mask. Then swish the spit around over the mask with your finger." I stare at her, bewildered.
"Spit?" I repeat, sure I had heard her wrong. "In the mask?"
"Yeah," she says simply, then leans over and, sure enough, releases two drops of saliva into each eye of the mask. My eyebrows arch in surprise, but as it is now apparent that she really did say 'spit,' I copy her, feeling like a poorly behaved kindergartner. "It keeps the mask from fogging up." She explains. Seeing my incredulity, she adds with a chuckle, "I know it's weird, but it works."
After playing in our own saliva by rubbing it all over inside the mask, we dip the mask into the water and wash it out (negating, in my mind, all the effort I put in swirling the spit around inside). Then my mom shoves the mask onto her face. "Breathe in and to see if there are any air holes." Her voice has become a nasal nightmare, but I copy her. No air holes. We then fumble with getting the strap around my head. Feeling very off-put with my source of air cut in half from my blocked nose, I shove the snorkel into my mouth.
Then, I dip my head under the waves.
And I enter a state of mild panic.
I can't breathe! my mind screams as I try and fail to breathe in through my nose. And then my mind registers that I still have my mouth, and I take short gasping breaths through my one, very limited, source of air - the snorkel. I can't decide whether to hold my breath or try to breathe through my mouth. My panic escalates as I am SURE a wave is going to wash over my life-tube and drown me. I can't breathe! Where is my nose?! I gasp, take a huge breath, hold it, then breathe out a tiny bit of air so my head doesn't explode with excess oxygen and suck in the air again, sure that with every breath in, I'll be sucking down some water at any second. My air tube is going to be flooded by these massive, life-threatening waves hurling me around. I am going to fucking DROWN.
I snatch my head back out of the water and hastily spit the snorkel from my mouth... and realize that I had been standing the whole time in the chest-deep waves; my feet hadn't even left the ground. My mom is staring at me, looking like some sort of warped seal with a horn on it's head with huge spectacles. Through her goggles she seems baffled at my reaction. Shut up, seal. She lifts the mask from her head and stares at me incredulously, realizes what she is doing, then erases her face like an etch-a-sketch and replaces it with a motherly look of pity. "Sometimes people have a hard time with it at first."
I glare at her. "I don't like it." I say, feeling slightly child-like. "I'm going to drown. Water is going to get in the tube and I'm going to suck it up and drown."
"No you won't." She assures me. "If water gets in you just blow and it spits it out."
What. The. Hell.
Not feeling that I want to take the chance to suck down some water, but reasoning that I should at least take a look around under the water while I have this ridiculous thing on, I put my face down into the water again. I barely have time to register that, no, there is nothing to see except rocks and sand and dirt swirling around, before I feel the panic starting to surface again and jerk my head back out of the water.
"There isn't even anything cool to see!" I whine to my mom while yanking the mask off my face. I'm done with this.
"Well, you have to get further out." She says kindly.
I just shake my head in defeat and make my way back to my towel. Snorkeling is obviously not for me.
My mom walks gracefully from the water and plops herself down beside me. "We will try it when there aren't such big waves, maybe in the bay." She assures me. I just nod my head.
"We should have brought ocean margaritas." I say.
"It's 9:00 in the morning." She reminds me.
"Pah. Next time, we will." Then we walk back up to her house. And I don't wear pants. Because this is Hawaii, and even if I can't snorkel, I can still walk around pantsless, and no one even looks twice. Thank you for that, Hawaii.
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