On the way back, with chlorinated eyes, I saw bright pink and purple flowers leaning into the road, within a hallway of trees above ranch-style fencing. A damp wooden beam is detached and rests on the ground at an angle. When the odd car does pass through this lane, it unsettles dust particulate that shimmers near the stop sign. The brake lights glow and the road momentarily composes itself and aligns with the warm stillness around it. The car goes on its way, glint sliding over the roof sunny side up, and the gravelly sound stretches into the long summer afternoon.

To get to the pool, I go around a barricade at the entrance of the college grounds – enough space for a bike to pass – and through the campus, past geometric sculptures and expanses of playing fields, winding this way and that, until reaching the weedy campus apartment path that starts with a pine drooping over the edge of the walkway, the green flag of the track that I duck under, and continues mazelike in the shade of pale yellow buildings outfitted with empty clotheslines. I exit down the grassy hill next to steps and reach the main road where the community center and swimming pool are.

I coasted up the blacktop slope and guided my bike into the rack. I gathered my things into my grocery pannier, walked down a set of three concrete steps, with its punchline rhythm, and checked in at the rectangular pool window, where it feels like there’s a dutch door to that almost empty room, but I can’t be sure until I go back. After you say your name, you go through a darkened blue locker room with exposed wooden trusses and metal reinforcements like you'd see at a waterpark.

Out in the light, there were some families at the larger pool today. At the smaller pool, a woman read by a torrential mushroom waterfall. I lowered myself in from the edge and swam underwater, crossing the blue and white buoys and trying the breast stroke again, self-consciously at first because of the watchful lifeguards who are no doubt adept swimmers who know proper technique, checking their faces for expressions until I didn’t care anymore, sometimes gliding downward and dolphin swimming with my shadow at the bottom of that heavenly lit place where an errant leaf turned like slow confetti. Back at the surface, I tried to mimic the form I saw in the video, breathing and resubmerging, shooting my hands in front of me underwater, straight as a dart, resurfacing, breathing, and finding myself at the other end. For a moment, I sat at the bottom of the pool. You have to expel bubbles or you won’t sink all the way.

A woman and her daughter were entranced by a lanternfly on the grate. I switched to my back and floated peacefully in the lap lane, ears underwater. The timing was right — the silhouette of a gull drifted across a joyful afternoon sky with cottonball clouds pulled thin, above the whole town where the door to the market opens with a chime.

Today, I didn't sit under the umbrella near the vine-laced fence that abuts the edge of a neighborhood. That evening, I took a picture of the last house on the street and its golden starburst window reflection that reached into the scarlet myrtle that grows wildly along the border. There are no windows on the pool side of this house, and I wondered which came first, the house or the pool.

I lifted myself out and water flicked in front of my feet one after the other until I got to my bag, where I put my turkish towel around me. I picked up my phone and saw a message about swimming that made me smile.