Comfort at the Bottom of a Swimming Pool

If you lay on your back and gaze up from the bottom of a swimming pool, the real world appears to bleed away. It's the kind of dream you don't have to go to sleep for. It hardly qualifies as tangible, so time turns soft and slow. The fragments of the sky and the shapes of the clouds will make the underwater world almost too comfortable. You can't stay here, your lungs will remind you. Whenever your head surfaces and you gasp for breath it's like you'd never even been away at all. The kiddy pool is still calm and empty. Your mom is still talking on the phone in the shade while your brother dives for pebbles in the deep end. Each time you dip under the ripples, it's a comfortable 51 second trip to a different planet. muffled surface noises cannot penetrate the solid intent of getting lost again. What is there to think about at the bottom of a pool? For the time being, you're not being asked to think certain things or throw your time away for something else like the next load of laundry or polite, thoughtless conversation with a boxy stranger. You are undisturbed and not pressed for anything except a quick breath of air. The sun rays break into pieces and roll against the marbled cyaneous ceiling that you admire so well. Something about that makes you wonder about nothing and everything all at the same time. On the car ride home, aside from memory, the only sign that the underwater daydreams actually happened was the puddle of water leaking from your ears and the stinging high up in your nose. It's nigh on impossible to find that kind of physical escape in many other places, but that's the best thing about it.