There’s a sigh of the sea over the glass, turning the sheen into transparent blue kikuyu. I can hear the roar of the water as the breath moves from the trees over this small square block of wet. It has the beauty and treachery of a sea, this suspended kingdom of white.
The roar turns to licking, the sweet licking and lapping of lips against their shore.
I sit on the red brick around the swaying, trembling arcs of light. Lines of light shoot out the water and zebra across an abandoned, punctured lilo.
It is at once a circus, a festival of light, but as the sun slips away, the glitter is gone, and instead gossamer hues bring an Arctic desolation to the vast and friendless waves. They drift and do not dance. They hold nothing but the chill of immersion.
I find myself wanting again. Waiting for something. I strain, as the water turns to foil, to fathom what is about this place that was so compelling. It is a bleak, deserted environment, and yet I remember how often you went swimming, even by yourself. Even surrounded by bodies, the submerged world is muted. Is that what you sought, some peace from the noise and mayhem above the water?
I dip my toe into it, and the chlorine salts and stings my soul with all the galas, the starting blocks, podiums, tours and tears that we shared together. This was where you abandoned your childhood, or drowned yourself in these cold, hospital like wards. You were here, in utero, while your friends played their games and ate their chocolates. But they all watched you, you who were even then younger than they were, just days after your first day of school. They watched you swim a full length of Butterfly, and the heroism of that one 50 meter event by a five year old served you for years and years.
It was your punishment and your pleasure, this blue life, away from life. It’s where you learned to hold your breath, to tolerate the cold, where your skin filled with pigment and deepened its colors against the intense gaze of the sun on your almost naked self. When I pull out my toe, I am hollowed out by all these images of light, and my spine has that towel tired fatigue that draws me slowly above the rectangle. I float and fade as the boiling cumulous break into black bubbles and shoot down at the gardens, between the pools, close to where I once was.
As I reel away, I feel a sinking weight blow against me. The fragment below me is a small light in the tumbling weeds of suburbia. It twinkles alone and nothing visits it, not a single soul troubles itself to visit your watery tomb. Only bees and frogs tumble in and are dazzled to death. I fly higher until all that is left is a sharp pinprick, battling to reach me through the swirling storm. It is then that a crystal snakes its way through my smoky being, but I buoy against it, resisting. But the quickening sense of my living claustrophobia creeps over me again, and is soon dripping over my eyelids, and nostrils, making my arms flail back to what was once a scratching, spidery plight in the pool. Mine, in or out of it, you know, was a long slow drowning. I realize, as I draw myself through the bubble, that what I could not do in my life, you did best in yours. Swim.
