You say it’s unusual to float in water without moving your limbs. My mother could. If you float you’re a witch. Either way, you were killed. You say it’s even more unusual to stay buoyant with that much metal in your neck. But in the water, my spine doesn’t crush or grind. I forget I have a spine—it’s a welcomed forgetting.
 
I can hear the crickets whispering as I bob. The doctor tells me, “It’s the screws in your neck settling in.” I want them to feel at home, welcome; these titanium crickets holding the metal rods and skull in place. Catalan pigeons are circling overhead. A green canary is passing amongst the flock of grey plumage. Was that you in London, trying to pass? I watch you pull yourself up and out of the water. For a moment you are Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool, Hockney’s blue come to life.
 
Our elderly neighbour is hanging her washing. She shouts at you with a frowning smile—somehow at once both angry and amused—to get dressed; one of the few Catalan phrases we understand, because of its similarity to the Spanish. We perform this ceremony often, this empty sacrament on a repeating cycle. You seek her voyeurism, she chastises you, I drift.
 
We are hypocrites, living in La Sagrera and not learning Catalan. “One language at a time,” you tell me.
 
You grab the grey kimono flung over my wheelchair, which is gathering dust at the corner of the courtyard. Here, dust communes with greater frequency and in greater numbers than the devout on Sunday, than local revelers on summer evenings in the plazas of Gracia; than generations of pyromaniacs on the Night of Fire or vocal American tourists in the Gothic quarter.
 
In England, I was shamed: if you can walk a little or need to stand at intervals to stretch, you can’t possibly need a wheelchair. They would rather I was in pain, in bed, injured and out of sight, than existing and partaking in society with a disability.
 
My wheelchair is not gathering dust because I don’t need it or because it doesn’t help me or because Barcelona isn’t accessible; despite the hills, it’s more accessible than most. But sitting for long periods increases the twist in my spine, aggravates the herniated discs, provokes the popping vertebrae. My preferred state is floating in water, suspended in near-weightlessness. Second to that is walking: walking slowly, with plenty of breaks, on streets lined with benches, obeying a Crip temporality with flexible appointments and deadlines that will bend time.
 
In England, hospital appointments were fixed. Three cancellations and I would be discharged from the clinic, back on the waitlist for another six months. Each cancellation was met with disapproval; a reminder of how much wasted time and money my sick body was responsible for. But moving through inaccessible spaces when sick and disabled is rarely straightforward. The trains in England were late; the carriages were packed. No space for a wheelchair. I had to give station staff a few days’ warning of my arrival—a few days’ warning that I would exist in society and would require assistance—and still, the ramp was often not there. There was no space or time for a body like mine to just be, to arrive without warning.
 
Faking a disability is a rarer occurrence than popular culture would have you believe. Disabled people being accused of faking is commonplace; a collection of experiences we share online to their disbelief.
 
My wheelchair could help me get to where I needed to be—my rigid start and finish point—but never alone; I needed someone to pivot me up onto the street lips that were rarely flush to the road. If my spine was twisting, crushing, grinding—could I stand up from my wheelchair to stretch without being called a “benefit scrounger” or a “fraud;” without being under threat of violence from those claiming to protect the disabled?
 
We are going to see my neurosurgeon later. The time isn’t set. Come in the afternoon, and if not, mañana. We can stroll there through the dusty city. There will be seats on the metro. I can sit on twelve different benches, if I choose to, while we wade through the humidity to the hospital. And perhaps next time the fatigue or pain will be too much, or my hip will have popped out, so we will wipe down my wheelchair and take the same route. Here, there is a lift into the metro, and not just at selected stations. There will be spaces; I do not need to warn anyone days in advance that I am coming, that I need a ramp. I can get on the train. There is a belt to strap in my wheelchair. I feel safe.
 
I float in the middle of the pool. My toes and fingers are wrinkled by now. You say it’s unusual to float in water without moving. I remind you of the water safety classes our nieces and nephews take. I tell you that babies can float in the water without moving. Dead bodies, too. Somewhere between birth and death, most of us have forgotten how to be still without sinking.