We decided to swim at midnight, which was either a terrible idea or the best one we'd had in years. The lake was forty minutes outside the city, down a road that turned to gravel after the last village, and the air coming through the open windows smelled of pine and wet earth and the particular rural dark that city people spend years learning to forget.
There were four of us: Soo-Jin, who had suggested it; Marcus, who had driven because no one else would; Elena, who had brought the good wine and therefore held irrefutable authority; and me — the one who had said "this is a terrible idea" three times between the city and the lake, and who was now, if I'm honest, more excited than any of them.
The path to the water was unlit. We used our phones, four small rectangles of light wobbling through the trees, Marcus narrating the obstacles in the tone of someone presenting a very low-budget nature documentary. Soo-Jin told him to be quiet. He narrated more quietly.
The lake was exactly as a lake should be at midnight: flat, black, reflecting stars we don't usually see. The far shore was a darker darkness than the sky. The only sound was the frogs, and the frogs were committed.
"Right," said Elena, already pulling off her shoes. "In we go."
"The water will be cold," I said.
"The water will be cold," she agreed, with the serenity of someone who has already made the relevant decision and sees no purpose in reconsidering it.
She was entirely correct. The cold was thorough and immediate and deeply clarifying. Soo-Jin made a sound somewhere between a laugh and an expletive. Marcus went in faster than any of us, probably because the anticipation was worse for him than the fact — which I had always thought was a character trait as much as a habit. Some people extend the approach. Others eliminate it. He eliminated it.
I went in last, and slowly, which is the wrong way. The right way is fast and total. But I stood thigh-deep in the dark water considering my options, and then I went in all at once because there was nothing else to be done.
Then we were swimming — which is to say we were floating in the cold dark water, turning on our backs to look at the stars, not talking much, because there was nothing to say that was equal to the occasion.
The city doesn't give you this. It gives you light and noise and the constant comfort of having something to do at all hours. What it quietly takes from you is exactly this: the dark, the cold, the water, the silence that is not actually silence but a different, older category of sound. The feeling of being very small in a way that does not frighten you.
We stayed in for twenty minutes. We dried off inadequately with one beach towel between four people and Elena's good coat. We drank the wine. Soo-Jin had also brought cheese, a fact she had not disclosed until this precise moment, and the revelation of cheese under those particular circumstances — cold, wet, stars overhead, standing on the dark shore — produced a disproportionate amount of joy.
On the drive back, everyone was quiet in the good way. The way that means something has happened that you are not yet ready to talk into a different shape.
I thought about the water. The cold of it, and the feeling of letting go of the bottom. There is a quality to cold water at night — a flatness, a particular transparency — that I have never found adequate words for, and I have been trying for years. The memory of it is one of those that doesn't thin over time. It stays exactly as cold and as clear as it was.
We got back to the city at two in the morning. The lights were still on everywhere, the way they always are. Marcus dropped us off one by one. When I got home I stood in my kitchen in wet hair, eating crackers, still cold in my extremities, unable to account for the specific contentment I felt.
Some things want to be singular. A midnight swim in a cold lake in summer — with the right people, the right wine, the unexpected cheese — is one of those things. I would not do it again tomorrow. I don't need to. It happened, and it happened well, and the memory of it sits in a particular place inside me that I return to, occasionally, on days that don't feel like much.
The stars were very good, though. They always are, once you remember to look.