As I slipped under the water of the hot tub on my family’s back patio, I realized I had made a huge mistake. Drowning was something I had never experienced before, but I hadn’t experienced swimming before, either. At least, not without a life jacket or water wings.

I learned a few things that day. Number one: order of operations is important. You’re supposed to get out of the water and then take off the life jacket, not the other way around.

“Time’s up! Get out before we close the cover on you!” my dad called.

“Okay!” I slipped out of my life vest, the blue one with the yellow duckies printed on it. I scrambled to the side of the hot tub, trying to get out, but my leg slipped on one of the seats and I fell back into the water.

Number two: you can’t breathe underwater. I realized that pretty quickly as water filled my nose, burning my sinuses with the smell of chlorine. I didn’t know what to do, but I knew that if I didn’t get air something bad would happen. I flailed around, trying to get my head above the water. In my panic, I took in a breath, only to inhale a large lungful of water.

It was oddly calm under the water, despite my body still screaming for oxygen. I had stopped flailing because I felt too heavy. It was like I was going to sink right through the bottom of the hot tub and into the brick patio itself.

Everything was muffled behind the wall of water that was pressing down on me. I could hear people’s voices on the other side of it, but not what they were saying. The sound of my name in broken and garbled syllables that just barely reached my ears as darkness started to blur my vision. I wondered why this hurt so much. I had never been in that much pain before. I had skinned my knees and gotten splinters from the playground, but this was a different kind of pain. Those types of pain stung, like a needle being driven in or like you’re on fire. But drowning was different. It was a pressing, squeezing pain, like there was a metric ton of bricks on my chest trying to flatten me into a pancake.

The blurriness in my vision started to give way to blackness, and I felt like I was falling asleep. The sounds were barely there anymore, as if I was drifting away from them. Instead, they were replaced with a ringing in my ears that I could just barely hear the hot tub filter chugging away over. The darkness grew darker and darker and darker, the sounds fading away to complete nothing.

Just before I was completely gone, there was an enormous splash, and a hand yanking me out of the water.

And then I woke up.

Number three: death isn’t like sleep. I learned later that I didn’t have a pulse after I blacked out, and that my mother had to perform CPR to get get oxygen in and water out of my aching lungs. It wasn’t like I was sleeping, when I was the rope in a tug of war match between Life and Death. It was like I was underwater one second and sputtering on the ground the next, and no time had passed at all. I opened my eyes and immediately vomited about a gallon of water, coughing and choking on it as it came up. I took a deep breath of air with a loud gasp.

Number four: I’m not allowed to almost die again. I woke up, and my head was still swimming. I could hear my mother holding back tears, yelling at me to never ever do that again, shaking my shoulders while doing so. Apparently almost dying scares the living crap out of people. It’s something I haven’t experienced since that day, and it’s an experience I don’t aim to repeat ever again.

At three years old, it was the first time that I had really understood what death really was. It wasn’t like what happened to our goldfish, where they were here one day and gone the next, buried in the yard because they didn’t want me or my sister to think that the toilet was the pathway to heaven. Instead, the pathway to heaven was a tupperware tub in a shallow grave covered by a large rock so that the neighbor’s cat didn’t eat you.

I started swimming lessons after that, but didn’t really get the handle on the whole not-drowning part of it. It was swimming lessons for toddlers, so we played ring-around-the-rosie and went under the water at the “they all fall down” part, and I would end up with water up my nose every time. They gave up after a few weeks of no progress, and I was content to leave the pool. Ring-around-the-rosie was about people dying from the Black Death, anyways, so I suppose it was appropriate that it was the theme music to water torture. I ended up learning how to swim by watching the family dog five years later, and swam leagues better than I had before after that. I’ve been in that hot tub many times since then, not letting the past trauma I’ve had with it get in the way of enjoying it. The hot tub now sits on our patio of our new house, but the only things that swim in it now are the bugs that somehow work their way under the cover. The mice have eaten the wiring in its underbelly, so no water has circulated through its system in quite some time.

As for me, I’m still much happier to just sit beside the pool and to feel the sun on my back.