A collection of very short

Pool

High up in the stands I gazed at her. She was swimming her usual twenty-seven laps warm up. I knew her training schedule by heart. She would emerge from the changing rooms at 08:27 exactly. She entered the water at 08:30 and, without wasting any minute, started her training. After the warmup, there was an eight minutes break. She would jump elegantly out of the water, take a sip from her water bottle and stretch.

She was now on her twenty-fifth lap, with two more to go. Her body was slicing the water effortlessly, creating no wave. She was in a lane by herself. She was not the fastest in the pool, but she was the most beautiful to look at. She pulled her arm out of the water, rotating her shoulder and extending her arm to the front, her fingers brushing the water below. She reached out forward, as if pulling on a rope, her hand stretching out before disappearing under the water as the other arm came out. The choreography was perfect and mesmerising.

She reached the end of the pool, dove, flipped underwater before powerfully pushing herself back in the other direction. I watched as she broke the water surface and took a breath, looking in my direction, but not seeing me. She didn't know I existed. She would never know I existed because I was in love with her. Usually, I swam in the lane next to her, catching a glimpse of her every time she overtook me in her lane.

In the water, I was everything she was not. I was slow and clumsy. I had no endurance, having to stop every five laps. I was just another amateur swimming in the pool, in the slow lane. I was invisible. I had not mastered my breathing. I breathed at variable intervals whenever I ran out of breath. After a lap or two, I would generally be out of breath, breathing every opportunity I got. By then, my arms would start aching, and my speed would slow down further. Progress became inexistent as I looked at the unreachable pool wall in the distance.

I watched her emerge from the water, taking a sip from her bottle once on solid ground. Her body as perfect as her planning, nothing out of place, everything was looking as it should. She went to sit a few meters behind the back of the pool, under the four-handed clock. She had looked at it as she sat. Everything was timed with her. Every stretching exercise lasted twenty seconds. It was the optimal time for her muscle to loosen up. I watched how she stretched her arms, then her legs.

When she was done, she put back her goggles on. She placed herself at the tip of the pool, her lane empty of any amateurs. She would now go fifty laps freestyle without stopping, mixed with butterfly once every six laps. I tried that training regimen once. It was so exhausting I quit mid-way through the first butterfly lap. That has been on a day I was in a good mood, a day when I thought I could attract her attention, make her notice me. But she had not.

"Hon, did you see?" I was abruptly brought back to reality. I blushed as my head spun to look at my husband. He was staring at me in the side pool, our son in his arms. "He just did his first lap without me helping," he commented. My son laughed as he jumped into the water. I forced a smile and nodded, waiting for him to focus back on our son, so I could focus back on her. She was all that mattered.

As my gaze fell back upon her, I swore to myself that one day I would learn her name.