It was dark, a dark blue, and it was snowing outside its tall windows. My breath was dispelling wet whirls of fog and torpid lust. I swam and I swam, as much as I could, and I somehow got to the end of pool, vaguely imagining how a fetus must feel while floating in its mothers womb. It can’t be this cold, I thought. I looked around, but it was dead quiet. One window had been disowned of its glass, so a bunch of ingenuously sterile snowflakes kept floating sluggishly through its hole, descending and dying on the surface of the motionless water. I broke the thread of my dispassion and thought of how unprecedentedly empty and tonic my head had turned,   impregnated with that cold bareness. I slided back into the water with a clink, feeling as safe as a vintage porcelain teapot floating farther from all tough surfaces. I forgot about my arms and legs until they smashed my bones into a wall, in the water. I fondled its crisp edge. It was cold as ice and at a closer look, it really was ice. I leaned back a second or two and pushed my body forward with what was left of what I knew as my physical strength. I didn’t feel the need to try that again so I slapped my woozy blue cheeks, fixed my hands on its edges and thrust myself over it. The ice raked the skin on my inner thigh, which started bleeding with a waywardness contrary to the wit of that whole place. I bumped into the second staunch piece of ice. It was starting to piss me off. I tried to break it twice, and almost broke my left leg instead. I pushed my body over it prudently and left a red mark which was washed away from the wall in a second. I was smelling blood because it was the only thing that had a smell in that cold which had chopped off life in all things warmer than itself.  When I could almost sense relief, as I was swimming faster and the water seemed to open up and give in to that kind of determination, I saw another wall before me, a few minutes away from me. It was a damn tall one, this time. A mouthful of despair was  unloaded down my throat and fell in my stomach with the weight of rocks. There was not a way I could jump over this one. I stopped moving around, abandoned the frosty motion that had led me here, but neither that could help me. I just wouldn’t fucking drown already. I kept standing there in the water, not another inch of me sinking. The despair which had conquered my flesh with perverted patience found itself kicked out by a state that mops everything in its rage. I do not get to have that choice, that choice doesn’t exist. It was too cold to cry. I came closer to the ice and started kicking it. It went down just as easily as I suspected, the moment I could understand its vain predictability. But then I saw really how deep that pool was, and how heavy that ice was. A noisy wave swirled all around me with what seemed like a reckless answer to my anger. It dragged me beyond and above the water, it grew to the top of the hall and then it broke like an avalanche that caught me under its ruins a few weeks ago.

 

I can’t wake up in the morning anymore. I don’t know who I am.

 

* Photos by Ana Tatu, my favorite person with a camera