Chapter Nine: BrainSpace (~jinghan)

The water is a perfect temperature on my skin: not too cold and not too warm. Light dances on every atom* of air suspended in the the water; it’s like swimming through sunlight. Surrounded by the blue of the water below and the blue of the sun above, my mind and body relax. Thoughts flow and expand with every stroke that I take.

Back when everyone that was anyone was sixteen and other girls were trying to be slim and beautiful, I decided in a rather rebellious stubborn way that bellies were made to be round. I mean have you ever looked at your belly in the mirror and considered what it would look like flat? It would be weird, that’s what. There’s nothing wrong with a healthy curvature, I told myself. However… that said there are still those days where the curvature is a little bit too close to being spherical even for my liking, and your belly feels like it doesn’t quite belong to you anymore. That’s usually when I head out for a swim, to swim off all the sluggishness and weight and to feel strong and awake. But today: it’s my mind that is taking delight in the exercise.

I sit at my desk typing madly, and changing the font colours as much as I spend leaving them alone. I was falling behind and struggling to understand everything in my Informatics class so I decided that this weekend I would go through the lectures and type out all my notes pretty colours and all. (Colours help me to remember things and organise information in my mind.) But it’s been six hours since I first sat down at my computer and the words are starting to not make sense anymore. My shoulders feel cramped. My legs feel cramped. But most of all my mind feel cramped. Staring at my 15inches of screen space for six hours has confined my thoughts to that same small eye-stabbingly bright rectangle. I don’t really care what the stuff means anymore. I feel like a bloody typing machine!

Time for a swim.

The sky stretches out before me as I backstroke down the pool, no box, no boundaries. Thoughts flow and expand with every stroke that I take.

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*I apologise for this misuse of scientific terminology, please don’t kick me out of my Bachelor of Science *winsome smile*