Breathe.

Blue. Brown. Breath. White. Brown. Breath. Green. Brown.

Fifty strokes out to the cool center of the lagoon. Spearing the water in perfect rhythm like a metronome, one hand after the other. Spearing like forked arrows. Each cupped palm diving, pulling her forward.

Counting strokes. Alternating breaths. Then, green blue white brown. Mouth a crooked OH as her chin turns to suck in the air now blue. Left right left right. Now white. Now green. Counting backward from nine and down again. Opening her eyes  under water she only sees the brown of the lagoon. When she reaches her destination – the dead center – she stops. Her legs hang down to where the sun hasn’t penetrated, where the water numbs her legs.

Treading water, quivering, she turns, flips around fish-like. Her body remembering its turning because a body holds a memory — a memory she’s held from countless turns in swimming pools. Here, she turns without a wall to guide her, tumbles like a seashell rolling in a wave and swims fifty strokes back, concentrating only on each stroke, each breath, each kick propelling her. Only that. Her body moving.

Eight . . . Nothing matters. Everything matters. Listen to your body. She is emptying her mind.

Cupping. Diving. Pulling. Kicking. Focusing on the centerline of her spine. Straight, keeping her hips from turning. Not thinking but feeling cold stiffen her hands. Four . . . Three … Two . . . One . . .. She counts once again down from ten. And swims. Breathes to the right. And to the left. Her mouth twists to catch only air. She strokes ten more laps. Water flowing, soothing. Making her feel flexible, weightless, free.

She’s finished.

She always feels that she’s left something behind when she comes out of the water. And she turns back to see just the shrub oak leaves on the horizon forming a pattern against the sky. A language of their own. She listens to the leaves rustle. She is going to be late for her next patient. A man with cancer, losing his hair. Cancer frightens her. It’s so fucking random.

She stands in the shallow, sandy edge of the tidal pond. Loosening her arms and circling wide in a kind of Qi Gong posture she calls Scattering the Debris. Eyes closed she imagines the flotsam and jetsam of abandoned rubbish pooling in clumps after a storm. She circles her arms and her hands move aside the waxy plastic shopping bags, a blue rope, bird feathers, a clear plastic baby’s bottle, a girl’s  orange nylon bathing suit, a green Frisbee. Thigh-high in the water, moving her arms, clearing a space, dismantling the debris. She stands one moment longer. Breathes and counts, and leaves the lagoon.

There are two things in life she wants to be good at. One is swimming.