You sank without fanfare. Your silky hair flowed about your head. Your pyjamas billowed from your scrabbling limbs.

I know what it means to drown. I’ve read about it. You would have struggled at first as you sank, holding your breath, growing exhausted. When your respiratory system reached a certain saturation of carbon dioxide, your muscles would have involuntarily aspirated. You would have inhaled a great deal of lake water and you would have convulsed, continuing to swallow and inhale more water. You may have vomited. You would have, mercifully, lost consciousness, and succumbed to pulmonary oedema, which is an accumulation of fluid in the air pockets of your lungs, and ultimately, you died of suffocation, which means you asphyxiated, which means there was a lack of oxygen in your blood, which stopped the beating of your beautiful, beautiful heart. All of this – the breakdown of your perfect body, the final shudder of your young heart – would have taken less than three minutes.

I didn’t know about this stuff then, that day I swam in the sea not paying attention to where I was going, telling myself this story about you. I hadn’t done my research yet. That day, my story ended with the image of you sinking in your pyjamas. At that point, saltwater filled my mouth and burned the canals at the back of my nose. This was the result of surprise wash from a large leisure boat. I stopped swimming to cough and spit and emptied my nose of saltwater, stinging and hot. I turned to shore to see where I was, and saw that the closest point of land was hundreds of metres away, perhaps half a kilometre. I picked a point of reference on land, a church spire, so that I would swim in a straight line. I put my head back down and began to kick. I was very cold. You were there in the water with me, too deep for me to reach. I tried to think of other things: the melting point of glycerol, the whereabouts of the cat.

Raising my head every few strokes to sight the church spire, I settled into an awkward rhythm. My teeth chattered, my fingers had curled into bloodless claws, and my feet were like blocks of wood. No energy, I hadn’t eaten much for days. With each breath, I grunted, trying to create heat. Here is a man who could drown, I thought. See how close a man can get.

I touched land at a rocky spit where a couple sat on a bench and watched me crawl pathetically from the water, a creature drenched through. It was a long walk back to my car, to my towel and warm clothes and jug of coffee. My numb feet bled on sharp stones that I didn’t bother to avoid. If it were possible, I would have walked deep into the ground that day, just dug in with my heels and burrowed under the dirt.