Three lane ropes cut diagonally across the surface and run off past the edge of the frame. The ropes, strung with white, blue and red floats in turn, sway a little with the current. The water is close to turquoise, and the grid pattern of the floor tiles is refracted into small broken pieces that ripple.
The ceiling lights come down like long columns and lay white bands on the surface. Not a single person is swimming.
Look at water like this for a while and the shoulders respond first. A body that has swum at dawn remembers the chill just before entering. The feel of wet tile under the soles comes back along with the inhale that shortened on its own as the water reached the sternum. Below the surface the water presses lightly on the chest, and because of that pressure the breath moves more shallowly than usual.
What shakes a person in the water is usually not the sense of running short of breath but the hurry to get the breath back quickly.
So you can put your palms below your ribs right where you are sitting. Take a short inhale through the nose. Let the exhale out thin and long, the way you release air bubbles underwater, slowly enough that it makes almost no sound.
Do it about three times and you can catch the feel of a slow rise and fall under your palms. It takes less than three minutes, so it is worth trying without closing the screen you are reading.
You can carry the same exhale over to the evening dishes. While the water runs over a bowl, stretch the exhale to the length of rinsing one plate, and check the force in your jaw at that moment. It is enough to note whether your back teeth are pressed together and whether your tongue is pushing against the roof of your mouth. Even if nothing has changed, the checking is enough.
The ropes of the empty lane sway a little all day long, even in the hours when no one passes through.
