Swimsuit Cover-Up on a Michigan Lake Dock at Dawn

The lake was flat. No boats yet — just the grey sheet of it, holding the sky back, the surface so still she could see where the dock's reflection ended and the dock itself began. She had been awake since four-thirty. She knew this hour the way she knew a few other things about herself: quietly, without having told anyone.

She walked out in bare feet, the weathered boards pressing their grain into her soles with each step, and stopped at the end. Toes over the edge. The air was cooler here above the water, and it moved the hem of her cover-up against the backs of her thighs — a slow sweep, there and gone, like something paying attention.

She stood very still.

This was the part she had been cataloguing all week. The other mornings. The way the want arrived before she was fully awake, already assembled, already specific. She had noted it the way she noted other things — the temperature of the water on Tuesday, the hour the loons went quiet — with the particular precision of someone who believes that if you record a thing exactly, you have understood it. She had not understood it. It kept arriving, each morning more fully formed than the last, and she kept standing in the kitchen with her coffee and letting it pass.

This morning she had not gone to the kitchen.

The cover-up was thin enough that the air reached her through it, and where it touched her she was already warm. That warmth had surprised her three steps from the house — the contrast of it, cool gauze against skin that was not cool at all. She pressed her knees together and felt the soft weight of the fabric settle between her thighs where the hem fell, and held that pressure for a moment, measuring it.

She exhaled. The sound came out longer than she'd planned — not quite a breath, not quite anything else — and it left without asking her.

The water did not move.

Her left hand found the hem of the cover-up. Not lifting it. Just holding it, the loose weave of the cotton between her fingers, learning its resistance. The other hand hung at her side, and she was aware of it there, aware of every finger, aware that she had not decided anything yet and that this was the last moment in which that was still true.

She had done this before — not here, not like this, not standing upright with the whole lake watching — and the memory of it was a physical thing, lodged somewhere behind her sternum. She compared that to this. The kitchen to the dock. The bed to the open air. The difference was the stillness required of her body when there was nothing to brace against, nothing to press into. Just her own weight, distributed through her feet, toes at the edge.

Her left hand lifted the hem.

The air found her. She held her breath — the specific held breath of someone who has just crossed a line they were going to cross anyway — and her right hand moved.

The lake stayed flat. No boats. Not yet.