Water baby.

My college is one of the only ones in Cambridge (or so I have been told) with an indoor pool. Somehow, I have made it to this point in the year without having tried out the pool.

Or at least that's what I said this morning. But this afternoon, having taken little steps toward the goal of being in the pool before the end of this month, I put on my bathing suit, put some clothes over it, and walked up the road to the pool. The weather was warm enough here today that it didn't chill me to the bone even to contemplate immersing myself in water, and so it was with no trepidation that I walked down the little steps of our funny little pool. It's big enough to do laps in, but they're very short laps. And there are no marks painted on the walls so that you can see when you're almost at one end of the pool. For a severely myopic person, this problem ranks somewhere between hilariously funny and not really very safe. Fortunately I was swimming freestyle and had an arm out when I made contact with the invisible wall.

The best bit was making contact with decades' worth of bodily knowledge that I have allowed to lie quiet (resting, let's say) since college. I have never been a particularly graceful person on land, but in the water I've always felt like another body altogether. When I was much less severely myopic, something about being in the water with my goggles actually seemed to correct my vision enough that I could see almost normally. Today I wasn't able to do anything like the things I could when I was at my strongest. But getting to stroke and drift and float and slip through a sunlit piece of water was exactly what I required. I'm aiming for a new habit--so that when I get home, I make myself stop missing out on our gargantuan (but comparatively cold, I don't doubt) pool.

You will swim through this weather, I tell myself in a little song, and when you return you will swim through that weather, and it will be that weather bound with this weather, this sun flown to that one, all cradled and caught back in the smacking splashing sweep of your stretching arm.

It's been a long time since I made my heart beat faster.