Thomas's Lake

Every summer, Thomas’s family spent a week in a small house near a lake surrounded by reeds and blue dragonflies. All his cousins would dive straight into the cool water every morning, swimming out to the little wooden dock in the middle of the lake. Thomas, though, always stayed on the shore, where the water reached no higher than his knees.

He couldn’t quite explain why, but the thought of no longer feeling the bottom under his feet filled him with an anxiety that gripped his stomach.

“Come on, Thomas!” his cousins shouted from the dock, waving their arms. “The water’s wonderful!”

“I’m fine here,” he’d answer every time, looking at the dark water in the middle of the lake with a mix of longing and fear.

One morning, his grandmother sat down beside him on the shore, her feet dipped in the shallow water too.

“You know,” she said, “I was afraid of deep water too, at your age.”

“You?” Thomas asked, surprised. His grandmother always swam so confidently, every morning, all the way to the middle of the lake and back.

“Me indeed,” she replied, smiling. “I learned little by little, one meter at a time. You don’t have to reach the dock right away. You just have to get a bit further than yesterday.”

That afternoon, Thomas decided to try. He didn’t head toward the dock: he simply took three more steps than the day before, until the water reached his waist. His heart was pounding, but the bottom was still there, under his feet, reassuring.

The next day, he took two more steps. And the day after that, three more, learning to float for a few seconds before putting his feet back down, feeling the water hold him up instead of swallowing him.

His grandmother always swam beside him, unhurried, never pushing him to go faster than he felt ready for.

“There’s no race,” she reminded him each time. “The water will still be here, tomorrow, and the day after.”

Toward the end of the week, Thomas realized one morning that he’d gone further than he had ever dared: the water reached his chest, and his feet barely touched the sandy bottom. One more step, and they wouldn’t touch at all.

He looked toward the dock, still far away, then looked at his grandmother, waiting for him a few meters away, her hand outstretched.

“One meter at a time,” she said simply.

Thomas took a deep breath, lifted his feet off the bottom, and for the first time in his life let himself float in water he couldn’t touch, moving his arms and legs the way he’d seen his cousins do all summer.

He didn’t sink. The water he had feared for so long was holding him up.

“I did it!” he shouted, his voice trembling more with joy than fear.

“See?” his grandmother said, swimming beside him. “You didn’t have to reach the dock today. You just had to go one meter further than yesterday.”

Thomas didn’t reach the dock that summer. But the following summer, when they returned to the lake, he was the first one in, swimming straight toward his cousins in the middle of the water, with no fear left to hold him back.