My partner gave me a diving course for Christmas and I was happy. For the first time in so long I was happy. I felt the beat of my heart and knew I was a live thing. It wasn’t until I opened the card, My love for you is as deep as the ocean, that my heart started beating and I realised that for the longest time I had been dead.

I have dreams. I wake from them crying. And the smell. It’s as if I’m dragging the corpse of myself behind me, instead of a shadow. Even walking is sometimes difficult with my own rotting body jangling along behind me like a ‘Just married’ sign. The thwack of flesh cans against concrete. The smell.

In my dreams there is never a moment of silence. The reef sizzles like a strip of bacon in a frying pan. Tiny explosive pops. The sound of creatures eating and being eaten, the scurry of tiny calcified legs, the soft bubbles of breath and defecation, and all this lulled into a solid noisy mass by the metronomic surge of the tide. It is never quiet down here in the depth of dreaming, just as it is never quiet on the ocean floor, and yet there is a kind of peace. My own breath moving noisily through the regulator, my own hands stirring up the debris on the reef floor.

My partner gave me a diving course and I felt lighter. I felt as though things might be possible now. I would get fit in preparation for my diving course. I would lose weight, I would swim out of the corpse of myself and emerge pink and sweet like a newborn version of myself. Sloughed. That is the word – I would slough myself.

She is here in my dream. She swims into my limited vision and she is pointing. She is directing my attention to a gloriously blue reef fish. Bright stripes and orange spots. Isn’t it grand? Yes, it is grand. Then here a knob of coral that turns iridescent when she passes her hand over it. I didn’t notice the octopus before, but now that she has pointed it out it is impossible to miss. I peer at the undulating legs, the skin tensing into rock-like wrinkles, the surface of it turning brown and black and grey. Octopuses are the most intelligent of creatures. You need ethical clearance to do experiments with them now. You have to treat them like human subjects. If they are in captivity, they become as bored as a human would. You have to put toys in their tank or they will start to take the tank apart, escaping through a deconstructed filter, heading back to sea. Recently, an octopus escaped from his tank. They say he made it back to the ocean, but how would they know? What if he died somewhere along the way?

I turn to her and I am not sure who she is. Everyone in your dream is you. Someone said that to me once and it seems to make sense. Is this the me that has been sloughed off or is she the part of me that is left after sloughing? I try to breathe but seem to have lost my regulator. I search for it, frantic. I look for bubbles. There are bubbles everywhere. I am not sure which ones are from my regulator. I have to take a breath. I have to breathe in. Breathing in is equal to about two weights. I become more buoyant. I rise through the dream. Breathing in water wakes me.

When I wake I am dead again.

When I fail my diving class, I sit at the side of the pool and try not to cry. I reach down awkwardly to take my flippers off. I am a big woman and as each year passes I become less flexible. Looking down at my shoes my heart sinks. When I drop something on the floor at work, I remember how hard it is for me to bend and reach under the counter. Cutting my toenails is a task I keep putting off until my toes start to gouge holes in my socks.

I put my foot up on the plastic chair and reach down and manage to unclip the first fin, then the other one. The wetsuit looks ridiculous. I know I should go and change, but the rest of the class are down at the bottom of the pool. I sit like a fat seal on my precarious plastic chair and watch as they take off their weight-belts and put them on again. All the bubbles bouncing prettily to the surface and me fighting back tears.

The instructor surfaces and looks warily towards me as if I were an unexploded bomb. I make the ‘okay’ symbol by curling my first finger down to touch my thumb. The instructor had taught me to do this instead of using ‘thumbs up’, which means I want to surface. I had used this when the panic hit. I struggled to the surface, dog-paddling, gasping for air with all the weights over my jacket. Nine stones. I had swallowed nine stones.

The instructor pressed the button to inflate my jacket with air. The button. That’s right. I had forgotten about it. I had forgotten everything except maybe that your lungs can tear if you ascend suddenly without breathing out. I had not breathed out when trying to surface. I had held all the air in my stretched-tight lungs.

Okay, I sign. He nods and sinks back to the bottom of the pool where the rest of the class are waiting to cycle through the required exercises as I shiver in my ridiculous wetsuit at the side of the pool.

These are the things I remember from the written exam:

If you vomit, you have to do it into your regulator, don’t take it off to spew.

If you come up quickly without letting out the air, your lungs might tear.

If you get too much nitrogen in your system, you can die from it when a bubble forms in your veins and travels to your heart or your brain.

If you have to vomit, do it into the back up regulator, the one that is yellow. Yellow is your vomit regulator and also the one that your drowning ‘buddy’ can use to breathe.

Many people vomit in the swell. The swell can make you seasick.

You can take a seasick tablet, but it might make you sleepy.

Fat people are more likely to get bubbles of nitrogen in their blood. Fat people are more likely to die while diving.

It is hot in the wetsuit and I sit here and I am not sure what I should do now.

There was no swell in the pool, but I feel vaguely nauseous.

I didn’t take a sea-sickness tablet and yet I feel like I could curl up into a drowsy ball at the side of the pool.

Everyone pees in their wetsuit.

In the short time before I failed to complete the first stage of my diving course, I managed to pee in my wetsuit.

In my dream she points to an eel slipping past. Everything she points to is wondrous, every piece of coral and snap of muscle and flitting fin, but these are her things. Her hands are noisy. Her gestures are a cacophony. I want the silence of the crackling-bacon reef. I want to discover things on my own terms. Therefore, when she points above us, I stubbornly refuse to follow her gaze. I continue to bend over the little iridescent crab, watching its legs tick over the snap of urchins.

She points, a shout of hands that seems louder now, insistent. She has become impossible to ignore. I hold up my hands. The gesture is a shouted what?! She points and points. Finally, I look up to where she is indicating, to the sly, sharp toothy maw of a shark, one so huge I am paddling back with both hands, though not quickly enough. Those teeth, rows of them, and the mouth opening, opening.

The whale shark is a filter feeder, which means that it moves along at a regular speed with its mouth open. It takes in water, plankton, miniscule particles in the water and filters them for food. It is the size of certain types of whales. It lives for seventy years or maybe more.

Whale sharks don’t eat people.

Sharks don’t intentionally eat people. They prefer to eat seals.

I was in a cab once with a girl from work. We were a little drunk. I was telling her about my experience with a dugong in Vanuatu. It wouldn’t leave me. It was obsessed with me.

Well you can’t blame it, she said. It probably thought you were a dugong. You look a bit like a dugong.

And everyone laughed.

I laughed.

We were a little drunk already. We were on the way to see a band.

When the cab stopped, I paid the driver. She said she would get change and pay me. I remember she never did.

A shark would prefer to eat a dugong than a human.

In Vanuatu, I swam with a dugong. It is hard in hindsight to believe that it happened. I still remember how fast my heart had been beating when the creature swam right up to me and turned on his side in the water. I had reached out and touched his belly. So soft. The top of him was covered in barnacles, but underneath he was slippery and tight.

The dugong put his flippers on either side of my chest and gently moved away from the shore, dragging me along with him. It had terrified me, this gentle cradling, the power in those flippers, the beautiful ugliness of the beast. He was broader than me and much longer, stretching out in the water beside me, like a lover would. I laughed when the creature pressed my chest more firmly and wiggled his body, edging me further out to sea.

I had been told about this dugong. A male. His partner had been killed by some local boys. Dugongs mate for life it seems, and he had stayed in the bay, lovelorn and lonely.

You might see him if you are lucky.

I considered myself lucky at that moment, but I was also afraid. I laughed and pushed the creature away from my body cautiously. He let me go but he followed me back towards the gentle incline of the cliff, and when I hesitated, turning back towards him, he pulled me close again. I am buoyant. I have no fear of drowning. I tried to relax and let him take me further out into the perfect green of the ocean. I remember that for a moment, in his flippers, I felt strangely safe.

My feet have started to go numb in the tight hug of the wetsuit. You have to put your foot into a plastic bag to get the wetsuit on. Something about the slip of plastic. When I went to the diving school for the first time, they gave me a couple of wetsuits to try on and a plastic bag. It was hot and I had walked out from the city and was covered in sweat. I struggled with the largest one for fifteen minutes before the girl told me that maybe I would have to get a custom suit made.

The wetsuit was expensive. I talked about it to a friend at work. It is like joining a suicide cult, I said, laughing. They make you give all your possessions away, sign your money over to the church, sell your house and then you have nothing and it is easier to commit to your own death. I told him that now I had spent so much on the diving, I just had to go through with it. Like spending all your money on a death cult, the money alone means that I will have to learn to dive.

Dive or die, I said and I was laughing, but he didn’t laugh with me. I suppose death cults aren’t something you are supposed to laugh about.

I hate my body. I hate how heavy and big it is. Each step an effort. The painful clicking in my hip as I walk upstairs. Every time I lean over and stretch to wipe my arse, I wonder if this is the moment I won’t be able to reach past the balloon of my belly. Once, on a plane I tried to clip up my seatbelt (low and tight) and it didn’t reach. I extended it all the way and it didn’t reach. I put my jumper in my lap and left it undone. I would rather die in a plane crash than ask the steward to bring me some kind of extension to fit over my huge stomach.

The next time I went on a plane, I easily clipped the seatbelt over my hips. It was odd. Why didn’t it reach that one time? Perhaps it was looped around the arm of the chair and I didn’t notice.

It was a relief to know that I could still sit safely in the chair of an aeroplane.

Still, every shopping expedition involves a certain amount of humiliation and some tears, later, when I am safely home.

The custom suit languishes under my bed like the part of me that has been sloughed off. I hide it there because it doesn’t fit in my closet. It is a pointless reminder. It is a shadow. It is the dead part of myself, or I am the dead part of myself falling asleep on top of it. It is the exact size and shape of my humiliation. It remains lying there, under the bed, even when I get up and go to work. It is my sleeping failure and it will always be there.

I knew I would love diving for several reasons.

The swimming pool is the one place where I feel at home.

I am a human cork. I float. It is like a party trick. Once, when I was a child, I fell asleep floating and woke up with the sun and a dapple of shadow on my face.

The weight of my body is gone in the ocean. I am no heavier than any other person. In fact, I am lighter. I bob to the surface like a dancer. I don’t even need to struggle to tread water. I can stand still, suspended, and just watch as other people struggle to stay afloat.

In water you can feel the world pressing in from all sides. This is so familiar to me. This is what it is like to live in my head.

The depression that I am immersed in almost every day is most easily described as the feeling of walking underwater. Everything is slow and sure and sad. This is what the ocean is. Or at least this is how I imagine it is to be under the ocean.

This is what my dreams tell me.

I am not afraid to dive because I am not afraid to die.

The worst that can happen when diving is that you can die.

I want to die.

Sometimes I want to die so much that the very act of trying not to die makes me exhausted.

My building is fourteen floors high. If I jumped off the top balcony, making my hands into the arrow shape a diver might make, I would hit the pool and crumple up on the bottom of it. All my bones would shatter. I know this because I have imagined it.

I have weighted myself to the bed to avoid the inevitable climb.

Nine weights it took to get me even close to the bottom of the pool. The instructor needed two. Nine weights and I was still bobbing to the surface. Empty your lungs, he told me and I tried, but my body wanted to hold on to the air.

This surprised me. I tried a mantra in my head, The worst that could happen is that you could die. The worst that could happen is that you could die, but the mantra was drowned out by a voice, not my voice, a separate voice, one that seemed unfamiliar. This isn’t right, it said. This isn’t right.

This isn’t right, I told the instructor. I didn’t know what else to say, my heart was beating too fast. I couldn’t breathe, even though my lungs were filled and wouldn’t empty themselves of air. This isn’t right. This isn’t right for me.

I pushed away from the dugong and bobbed gently back to the cliff face and climbed up it, grinning, knowing the creature had identified me as something like itself, a great blubbery thing of the ocean. It was the one time I felt like I was exactly the right size and shape.

You look like a dugong, said my drunk friend in the cab. Do you blame him? You were his perfect dugong princess.

I laughed.

We all laughed.

It was true. At the time the dugong’s attention had seemed like a good, if scary, thing. A special thing. Later, when my friend said I was a dugong princess, I realised it was the opposite of good. I laughed and paid the cab and noticed how the car dipped downward when I awkwardly shuffled to get out. Later, at home, I cried. I realise that that pretty much sums up most things in my life.

I saved a woman from drowning once. It wasn’t terribly heroic. My friend Katherine was already in the water. She was reaching out with her powerful arms for a large, flailing man. Katherine already had him in the rescue position when I put my palms to my mouth and called out: Are you sure? Are you sure you need me to help? There’s a terrible rip there. It goes out to the open ocean. All those words when I might have been leaping in, swimming.

When I did leap in and swim I did so reluctantly, knowing that I had never been a strong swimmer. I bobbed in the water, pulling myself along with a half-hearted breaststroke towards the drowning woman.

This was on Stradbroke Island, Minjerribah. The appropriately named Amity Point. I wonder if that is where they dived with the whale shark. It seems too neat, too coincidental. I am sure the whale shark was on the other, trendier side of the island.

When I reached the drowning woman I was pulled under by the blind panic of arms and legs and a skinny writhing body. I pushed her away and placed her arms firmly around my voluminous waist. Hold me here. Don’t come near my face.

Katherine was swimming against the rip. I yelled over to her that we should swim across the rip. I knew you couldn’t swim against it. It was pointless. We would tire and then we would all die.

We started to swim in the other direction. The very edge of the island pressed out into the ocean, a faceless stretch of rock that you would probably call a point. We swam for that.

It was a close thing. The edge of the point raced by. Katherine stroked strongly towards it, grabbing an outcropping of rock as the rip continued to drag at her legs. I reached out, held land, lost it, grabbed for it again, the rocks seemed to be getting further from my fingers. I barely noticed the woman clinging to my waist. I used every last bit of my strength and reached out and found a handhold. Katherine had to drag me up onto the rocks and I cut my feet on the jagged coral and thought I might cry but I didn’t.

The people we had saved were on holiday from India. Embarrassed and exhausted and thankful, they hugged us when we had walked the long way back to the deserted beach. When they were gone it was just us, traipsing back to the shack we were staying in. We were on a writing retreat together. We stood in the bare lounge room. It was cell-like. We felt like monks, quiet and virtuous, tapping away without any distractions.

Saving the Indian tourists had been a distraction. It did something to our relationship to our work. Something important had happened. Something amazing and important. It was something to do with my body, the roundness of it, the way it floats. It took nine weights and I still couldn’t get to the bottom of the pool. I remembered the dugong holding me around the waist the way the woman had held me. Trusting me as I had trusted the dugong. Clinging together. Floating.

There was no phone reception on that side of the island. That’s why we chose it for our retreat.

We wanted to call our partners. We’ve just saved two people from drowning, we would say. We were almost swept out to sea.

We brushed our teeth, climbed into our cold, separate beds and lay awake for hours, staring out at our separate fragments of sky and all those stars out there. The size of the universe, the smallness of our bodies, even my own big fat body. That had something to do with what happened. I wasn’t sure what it meant but it was something. This thing had happened. I wanted it to mean something. I wanted it to have changed something.

And then it was morning. And everything was the same. We weren’t dead. The Indian tourists weren’t dead. But that odd displaced feeling had dissipated, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t recall it again.

This essay was supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.