Atlantis

The water is cold. 

I’m not swimming now, just wading. The cold air bites into the wet fabric of my cable knit, soaking down into my bones. 

The lake is the color of old steel, its flat surface too opaque to be a window, too dark to be a mirror. I can easily stand where I am now. But I still can’t see the bottom. 

I glance up, checking the distance to the rocky beach. Just a few hundred feet now. I can make out my jacket, crumpled on the ground. Nearby, the pages of my newspaper start to dance and float as the breeze picks up. One catches on the tire of a bicycle leaning against the rock wall divider. Now that I'm alone, the wind is the only sound. 

I’ve walked to this lake and stood on that shore a hundred times. Hardly anyone ever comes here this late in the afternoon. Too cold. Too grey. Once in a while, a cyclist will stop to rest. One stopped today, obviously. But most of the time, it’s quiet. A good place to catch your breath. To get some perspective. There’s something so primal about the water. Its stillness, its depth, its dense and intricate story, all buried, sucked down toward its unknowable center. 

I had a history professor in college. Queer old guy, liked to focus on nasty, real retellings of the stories we all got the whitewash versions of in high school. “History bites,” he would say, standing at the board, chalk all along the back of his tweed jacket, his mouth twisted into something between a grin and a grimace. “History scratches and pokes. History has claws.” 

The lake is like that. 

Today was the first time I’ve actually gone in. I guess I never had much of a reason before. But I’m pretty sure, as I near the shore, that it won’t be my last.