The chlorine and lifeguard duty mess with your head.

I want to stop confusing what I have with what I am, pick life back up where I left it sitting poolside debating whether or not drowning really is worse than burning alive. I was always too cold to swim or save a life even though the sun left scorch marks on my flip-flops and so I hid in the safe warmth of the clubhouse showers, wondering how to create for myself a Sleeping Beauty tale of spending an enternity standing in a grey-tile paradise, freezing to the touch save the steam clouds and lukewarm patter of sweat and condensation and tears I did not know I had. I picked the stall with the little utility window so I could watch you smile and shake off the water with a ph-balance I checked regularly like a thousand diamonds falling from your dark-brown hair. Blondes were never my type.

I never remembered to bring a towel, and so I would stay, showering until the sun went down and you went home, until the night you left one folded for me on the wooden steps.

I turned on the hose, wrapped the towel around the nozzle, and pretended to drown myself in the shallow end.