Clustered swimsuits quitely shift in the steamy dark, pink skins gleaming faintly in the ember red wet sheen.
Buttock-smoothed benches welcome and bid farewell to a rolling tide of grinning tourists, felt-crowned addicts, recovering revellers, and those silently absorbing the moment and the heat and the pine and the smoke and the dark into their bones.
The mind stills, the body unclenches. Consciousness coalesces in the racing chest, the sharp pinch on the ear tips, the stifled sips of hot breath. The body knows when it’s time, awkwardly rising and tottering through the black, through the door and into the clean bite of winter chill.
The lake both beckons, and forbodes. Cold metal shocks aching palms and soles. Now the slow exhale as an icy blanket of needles claws at composure. The eye of the storm is there, if still enough to see it.
Through the cycle once more.
Each time, space widens, connection deepens, peace grows.
