The Last of the Dark

Barton Springs Early Morning Swim Report

Enough of a moon to dazzle, & the first clear sky I’ve swum under in some time. The sun just lightening the sky when I get out at 6:30AM, like egg whites in cake batter. Yesterday due to circumstance beyond my control, I didn’t swim. Today I did, though I set out a little later than intended & only managed two laps.

It’s near the end of my teaching semester. I get very little writing done alongside my teaching, but when the semester ends I am a bear, unreachable, deep in the cave of my own work. It’s close enough to the end that, as I swim, I can apprehend my own sentences flashing through my head, not yet close up, like the flora & fauna of Barton Springs. Is that a fish muscling far below me? A wreath of moss braceleting my wrist, or a wraith? Hard to tell what’s living or dead, substantial, about to fall to bits.

If you swim early enough you don’t have to leave through the full-body turnstile—the Human Cuisinart, I always think of it—like the ones in the MBTA stations of my youth. You can just walk out the entrance. But I like the full-body turnstiles. They seem to suggest that something has finished: you can’t turn back easily. You can only, for the moment, go forward.