At age 14, I had a wonderful epiphany that changed my life: I decided that trying to get a tan was dumb.
Before then, I had always passively accepted the idea that I needed a summer tan. I envied my friends whose legs glowed with golden-brown summer health.
But unlike my friends, I hated sunbathing. Like a bellowing sun-scorched vampire, I felt ready to burst into flames after minutes of exposure.
I thought tanning was a test of character, a way to see how much pain you could endure before you crumpled into shameful surrender. Getting a tan was like losing weight by fasting, a hard won prize won only by self-punishment and toil.
I tried to be stoic and brave as the sun threw epic trials at me. Buzzing happily, hornets tried to burrow inside my ear canal. Sweat tiptoed down my back and legs. I itched. Through all of this, my skin remained paper-white, and my friends shoved their darker arms against mine to show off their dermatological edge.
The tan I did get was rusty and uneven, always teetering toward an irritable red color. My skin was simply all wrong for tanning, and I finally thought, “Who needs a sun-kissed glow? Pale tragic skin has its own charms;” it was as if a great weight have been lifted.
I celebrated my freedom and Nordic heritage by planting myself indoors, blasting the air-conditioner to sub-arctic temperatures, and playing Nintendo. Meanwhile, studies rolled out that linked tanning to skin cancer and premature aging.
“See?” I said. “Tanning is stupid.” I loved to be right.
Perhaps as a result of my adolescent resolution, many have told me that I look freakishly young for my age, validating my natural inclination to spend most of my time indoors.
But recently, since moving to Florida, something has changed: I now have day-long access to a swimming pool.
Although I hate doing most things outdoors, I love swimming pools. I can see mine across the pond from my apartment. It tempts me away from my writing with its promise of enveloping coolness amid the June heat. I imagine the sun spilling its warmth on my face as I float weightless on my back and watch the clouds skid by.
The pool is surrounded by a spacious brick deck. Beyond its fence are wind-tossed palm trees and beyond that, a pond. An enticing stairway leads beneath the crystalline surface of the pool and into its sun-dappled depths.
Only the kids ever seem to swim there. Their parents only lie around on lounge chairs, sluggish as sea turtles, trying to bake themselves as I once did. But I am baffled.
The idea that anyone would go to a beautiful, deliciously cold swimming pool for the sole purpose of lying in the sweltering heat while accruing sun damage seems beyond ludicrous and possibly insane. Having the opposite goal, I slather myself with a heaping coat of SPF 30 sunscreen before even poking my head outside the apartment.
Feeing smug inside my sunscreen shell, I mentally tell the roasting moms “Look! See? Pool. There is a pool right here. Why on earth would you not want to be in a pool when it is right in front of you? And do you know what excess equatorial UV rays can do to your skin? This is madness. Madness, I tell you!”However, Florida is sneaky. As I mentally chastised the sunbathers, feeling protected by my UV block, something was changing beneath my awareness.
Without my permission, a tan line, subtle and insidious, was forming between the boundaries of my bathing suit and bare skin. New freckles, too, were quietly dribbling onto my shoulders. When I later discovered these permanent new skin features, my shoulders looked as if the sun had sneezed all over them.
Somehow the treacherous Florida sun rays had done the unforeseeable; they had burrowed beneath my shield of SPF 30 sunscreen and altered my appearance.
I pointed a blaming finger at my hard-walled sunscreen bottle, which coyly refused to part with more than one gloopy drop of lotion at a time, even when squeezed with herculean force.
Determined to protect my identity as a pale, bookish anti-tan rebel, I resolved to be more patient with my lotion bottle and only visit the pool if I had coated myself with enough sunscreen to resemble a dollop of vanilla ice cream.
I also considered getting a more powerful sunscreen, something with a reassuring name like “Liquid Cave” or, better yet, “Post-apocalyptic Subterranean Bomb Shelter.”
I have thought about avoiding the pool altogether, but all it takes one look across the pond at the pool deck, and suddenly I am springing out the door in a bathing suit with a towel. The pool is always there and always tempting, like a siren song luring me to first freckles, and then sultry death.
Despite my anxieties, I am beginning to see the swimming pool as part of a pattern: Despite all my efforts to stay the same as before I moved, Florida is claiming me, not only with geography and new memories, but with solar tattoos.
Aside from the pool, Florida bursts with natural beauty, lush forests, and exotic wildlife. With its beaches, swimming pools, and parks, Florida seems eager to give me an easy tan at a time when I no longer want one. As I pull myself inward, Florida pulls me outdoors, into a forsaken sun-lit place long abandoned to my childhood past.
The pool is so irresistible, and Florida so enchanting, I have finally resigned myself to raising my makeup shade a degree or two.
But most of my favorite things to do are still indoors. After 30 minutes of swimming I am ready to read, write, or play Skyrim, until the next day when Florida pulls me out again, my heels skidding, to etch new graffiti on my skin.