A brief visual poem combining personal archival footage with Stevie Smith’s homonymous poem. In the video, we see a young boy — myself as a child — swimming alone in a pool. The footage is slowed, color-shifted, and sonically altered, creating a sense of tension and estrangement that resists the surface innocence of the image. The piece directly engages with my experience of cerebral palsy — a condition that shaped both how I perceived my body and how it was misperceived by others.

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By altering the materiality of the footage, I distort my body into gestures and positions that were never physically possible, evoking an inner truth the original image could not contain. These distortions suggest how trauma lingers in the body: submerged, misinterpreted, or quietly endured. The poem is recited by a child from my family, lending the voice of another to my younger self. This gesture of substitution constructs an autofictional persona — an impossible act of speaking from the past — through which I confront these early experiences of disability and alienation.