2am

effortless. that's how she'd describe swimming. effortless like breathing is effortless. like something you do without thinking, without expending... effort.

the pool was a 24/7, swim at your own risk, olympic size extravagance in the basement of her building. a throwback ammenity in a throwback apartment building in a throwback neighborhood. building & pool both old but not forgotten - mended yet clean. neighborhood? the residential neighborhood was all-but-forgotten, a few midrise apartment buildings bounded by generic midrise office park. the area was once considered hip & urban, the eager development team touting the walk-to-work concept, but it turned out that few hip urban professionals have a desire to walk to work, preferring the sterile comfort of a car ride from home garage to office garage, never mussing onesself with the outside air.

she favored swimming at 2am. on rare occassions there was another in the pool, but it was generally abandoned at this hour. not that she cared if others were present. she didn't choose 2am swimming for the isolation - she chose it because of the insommnia. she was awake and it was not her style to worry about why she could not sleep or to fritter the time in mindless web surfing. of course - after years of 2am swims, the likely explanation for not sleeping at 2am was that her body expected to be swimming.

gliding through the tepid pool she let her mind wander over the events of the past week. if you had told her 7 days ago that she had a sister, she would have laughed in your face.