What He Was by Roland Goity

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He’d been a schoolboy, as all boys had. A good student, then a great one.

He’d been a yard hand for neighbors. And a stock boy at the local supermarket. Weekend and summer jobs, when he was young.

And he plunged head first into bright clean pools and the mucky muck. It didn’t matter the clarity of the water’s surface, just as long as he could dive.

He’d been an expert in international relations and law, garnering degrees, a JD among them. He worked for a firm, where he really excelled.

And diving into glittering emerald swimming holes, fourteen feet to the bottom, from veritable cliffs in cataract canyons that fed into the Colorado River, he felt as if the world was his, as if he’d completely conquered all matters of fear and despair until only joy and exhilaration remained.

He’d been the prime thinker of a think tank, a mover in Washington. A man whose influence was sought and coveted. Oh how it was coveted.

He’d been a UN ambassador. He’d shaken the hands of diplomats from Russia, China and Great Britain; from Iceland, Paraguay and Tanzania. He’d instigated peace talks and mitigated inevitable wars.

But as he lay in his hospital room, on his bed, his death bed, the drip drip drip of morphine funneling through his IV, he plummeted into the recesses of his mind, and realized he was still a diver.