This text was written as I learn to live with Long Covid and attempt to regain my creativity. All the posts and some more info can be found here.
I dip into the lake slowly. Triathletes circle the boundary in their slick black wetsuits, head hidden under a primary colour cap, nose pinched with a clip, and eyes sunk into plastic goggles. I watch them speed along, unawares of the rest of us, the slow swimmers who await the cold.
I have barely swum this summer. I have struggled a lot with fatigue but more truthfully I have not enjoyed the silky thick summer water. I remained confined to the winter loop of square yellow buoys by the lake's entrance. In winter it is peaceful there with only a handful of us swimming at a time, a few more folks dipping by the sauna. Today, in the last days of the long holidays, it is busy as it always is this time of year. Paddleboards launch near the yellow buoys and cut a line through the swimming lane. Children run amok, scream as they run and play. I miss the distant muted quiet of the far end of the lake, the tickle of long weeds that wrap around my bare ankles. Also, the water is warm. This is the real issue. I miss the tingle of cold, the vibrancy of my body on high alert screaming at my brain to get out whilst wanting to remain in the peculiar pleasure of bright cold reverberating in every cell of my body.
Today I hear the faint echoes of the cold to come and I linger. My hands and feet are free of neoprene. It is not truly cold, yet my skin tingles slightly. The sky is covered in fish scale clouds ranging from white to deep grey. The air has noticeably cooled over the last week and the water has followed their lead.
I plunge my head under the surface and let my body push and pull at the pleasure of it. My friend, two breaststroke ahead, talk of something I do not listen to. Summer is waning. I sense it in the cooling evening. I see it in the gathering darkness that quickens my heart with anticipation. I drink it in the sudden heavy thundery rain showers and the delicate drizzle that lifts the last of summer's petrichor. I know it in the echoes of my tingling skin that pulses long after I've left the water.