Prune Hands

I want to go swimming. I don't want summer. I don't want the beach with its dissonant waves and its cranky mothers with veiny legs. I don't want a party. I don't want toys and bikinis and prayers against the storms. I want a dank, damp, pool in a building that pleaded with its constructors not to add shitty tile floor, but whose cries went unheard. I want to feel that tile underfoot as I pad to the edge of the concrete. Fluorescent lights hum down on me as the water - a sickly cerulean - churns below. I don't want to dive in, full of escalated joy. I want to slide in, to slink in; the way a criminal or an ill mutt does around street corners. I want the four feet of ugly 84 degree water to swallow me whole, one second at a time. I want to dread putting my head under, but can't stand to be half wet. I crave that splice. And then the rhythmic, infinite laps of back and forth. Every time I approach the far wall, I have a panicked vision of slamming my lower lip into the cold slab of stone and bleeding into the water as my tooth goes through. I yearn for that feeling. I want to go swimming. I really do.