Losing It. Emma Rathbone

are?”

      “Yes.”

      “Awwww,” she said, staring at her fingernails, a million miles away.

      It hadn’t always been like this. Before I got the job at Quartz, before I moved from the Southwest to the East Coast, into an apartment complex that was next to a glinting four-lane highway and had a view of a storage center, before all that I’d been a competitive swimmer. I’d started at the age of twelve, when my mom signed me up at the pool so I’d have something to do while she was at her GRE prep, and I immediately found I had a knack. I remember thinking, This is all you have to do? Just try to keep pushing as hard as you can against the water? Stretch your arm farther than you did the last time and keep doing that? I kept going because I was encouraged and because I became addicted to the approval I saw in the eyes of my coach. I had an instinct, too, that I noticed others didn’t have: how to time your first kick after a turn, the arc you sculpt with your hands in the water to get the most pull, minor adjustments that give you just enough of an advantage. I just knew what to do and it felt good.

      By the time I was thirteen I was a two-time record setter at the Junior Nationals. I went on to get second and third place for the backstroke at the Nationals in consecutive years. I competed internationally, and when I was only sixteen years old I was ranked sixth in the 100-meter breaststroke at the World Championship Trials in Buffalo. Do you know what that’s like? To be sixth best at something in the whole world? I’d lie in bed and think about it. Sixth. The sixth fastest female swimmer under the age of eighteen. When you took into account the caprice of fate, the random way things jumbled and settled, couldn’t sixth, in another variation of the universe with slightly reassembled factors, have been first? Maybe I could have ranked higher—if it wasn’t for a kink in my shoulder, and a determination that unexpectedly caved in, one regular morning at college.

      It was a Wednesday my junior year at Arizona State, where I was on a full athletic scholarship. I was sitting on the bench, waiting for Coach Serena to write the day’s practice sets. I had a queasy-sick feeling from being up so early, something I’d experienced since high school and never been able to overcome. I was in a daze, licking my thumb, staring at the way my thighs pooled on the wooden bench. My shoulder had been clicking. It was a small feeling, something minutely out of place when I brought my arm above my head. I thought it had to do with the angle of my palm in the water and so that week I’d been trying to adjust my stroke. Candace Lancaster was next to me, her head between her legs. I looked at a poster (“LET THEM EAT WAKE”) on the wall of the pool room and contemplated whether I should stop by the cafeteria on the way back to my dorm after practice. A few of the other girls walked in from the locker room. There was bulimic Erin Sayers from New Mexico. There was snake-tattoo Kelly from Pennsylvania, and then behind them was someone I’d never seen. She was tall but she looked so young—like a middle-schooler. We made quick eye contact and then she stared aloofly at her nails.

      Her name was Stephanie Garcia, and she was a backstroker, like me. I’d worked hard to establish myself on the team, to make myself indispensable. I couldn’t believe it when, five minutes later, she surged by in the lane next to me with what seemed like appalling ease. She was like an engine running on cool, mean energy that would never be depleted, a new model that makes you see all the clunky proportions and pulled-out wires of everything else. I tried to catch up, I really tried, but I couldn’t.

      Five hours a day, six days a week, gouging it out in the hours before school started; the cracked hands, the chlorine hair, the shivering bus rides and random hotel rooms, the fees, the dogged effort of my parents, the year I didn’t menstruate, all of it to just be really, really, really good at one thing. And then someone strides in with a kind of poured-gold natural ability; someone who hits the clean, high note you’ve been struggling for with an almost resentful nonchalance, and the game is over.

      You could feel the coaches, even that morning, readjusting their focus, reassembling the team in their minds. I could see how it would all play out—how hard I would have to work, how many more hours I would have to put in, just to maintain my place. Older, shorter, I would never be as good as her. Plus there was my shoulder. I’d been ignoring it, but it was there—a light popping that couldn’t be worked out—a button caught somewhere in the works. It would only get worse.

      Mentally, I quit that morning. A part of me wondered if I’d been secretly waiting for something like this to happen, or if I wasn’t as determined as I always thought I’d been. But it wasn’t that. It was an immediate understanding of what was now before me. A lifetime of knowledge and observation served me in one life-changing assessment. I guess I can be grateful that I just knew and didn’t delude myself.

      It took me a week to say something to Coach Serena. She was the kind of clean, windswept older lady I hoped to be one day. But her manner during our conversation, though perfectly pleasant, confirmed my instincts. She said she was sorry to see me go, and I believed her, but she didn’t try very hard to convince me to stay. I stared at a decorative bronze anchor hanging on the wall of her office in a low-lit subbasement of the Memorial Gymnasium as we made the sterile small talk—so different from the years of barky, feral encouragement—that would be our final interaction.

      With a year and a half left of college, I found myself beached on a communications degree I had no interest in. When I’d had to pick a major, I’d gleaned from other swimmers that it would be the easiest, but I’d still barely coasted by. I graduated by a hair, and, not knowing what else to do, I moved in with my friend Grace. We had a small one-story house in Tempe. I got a part-time job at a cell phone store—long, silent afternoons behind a counter, or assembling cardboard cutouts of buxom families on their devices. I started coaching, herding little kids in their bathing suits with their big stomachs, talking to parents who lingered after practice. It was all the chaff of the swimming world I’d once dominated, and I realized I had no interest in being on the sidelines. I wanted to shuck it all off.

      I went to a career counselor at Alumni Services and she convinced me that the determination I’d exhibited in my swimming career, as well as my communications degree, made me a perfect candidate for some kind of vague position in the business world (she mentioned something like “account manager” and “verticals”), and that moving to the East Coast, where I didn’t know anyone save a cousin who bore for me a mutual dislike due to years of forced hanging out at holidays and family reunions, was not a terrible idea.

      My second mistake was not doing more research and finding a good place to live. I was moving to a big city, a place I didn’t know, but I didn’t realize there were neighborhoods where young people were supposed to live. I believed the website of the apartment complex I ended up moving into, called Robins Landing, that said it was a mile from the charming downtown of a sub-city called Arlington. What they didn’t tell you was that it was an unwalkable mile of overpasses and parking garages, part of the never-ending Washington, D.C.–area sprawl.

      Still, when I first started, I liked the job. I liked the rituals of the working business world, all new to me. I took satisfaction in my painstakingly selected svelte new professional clothes, and striding across the rain-soaked walkway and through the glass doors of the building I worked in. And other little things, like shaking a sugar packet in the break room, and then pouring it into a mug of coffee. I saw myself doing that from the outside, efficiently shaking a sugar packet in my pencil skirt and quarter-inch heels. This is what people did, I thought. They got jobs. They went to meetings. They made friends and exchanged knowing and humorous comments in the hallways about all the same TV shows.

      I did hang out with Paula, my cousin, a few times, at her massive house in Silver Spring, Maryland. I’d balance a glass of wine on my lap and sit in the excruciating silence I remembered from our interactions as kids. “Nice bowl,” I’d say, pointing to the one on her coffee table. “Is that— Did you make it? Is it made out of clay?” “No,” she’d say, wiping something off the corner of her mouth, her red hair scraped back into a bun, her old-man’s face as usual just never giving an inch. “It was a gift from Danny.”

      “Danny …”

      “Kinsmith. Your other cousin? If you ever called him he’d tell you he’s taken up ceramics.”