7/8th of January

You often dream about houses, someone said. 

And swimming pools, I thought.

I fall into big, tearful eyes, and they turn into a sheet of water with an open sky. I sit on the shore and swing my legs. I may be one of many eyelashes, but I don't know who I belong to. What's more, I'm sure I'll fall out someday, perhaps with a tear. Our eyes are sewn together with fragile threads, it takes so little to sink them. 

I am the quietest day of every new year. It is only noisy on the way to the seventh house, wherever it is. Probably scattered under the trees, merged with the forest -- impassable, unfinished, with an overgrown garden and a well: a house where I will arrange cups for my first pay cheque on a ladder. 

I think about all this, but I'll wake up soon anyway. I'll check what time it is and come back. It's before four in the morning.

I quickly calculate: the floor needs to be removed, wooden panels are needed, heavy curtains, indigo bedding with frills, a Chinese teapot, family heirlooms. And so, calculating, I am back on the shore again.

It's still a dream. I'm in an open swimming pool, feeling the cold beneath me. I'm not thinking about anything, just waiting. Apparently, the future is the next five minutes, and the rest is imagination.

I move and hear the snow crunching. The edge is a snowdrift that I'm trying to get out of so I don't fall into the water. I don't know why, but I'm terrified of touching it. 

My thighs look as if someone has tattooed green ferns on them. I want to check if it's just a drawing, but that requires going into the water. Lots of green veins full of feathery, cool leaves. Gripping and ready to jump like rabbit paws.

At the other end of the space stood a woman -- slim and tall, smiling. Naked. Wearing only high Roman sandals, laced up to her knees. Her arms were like branches, flexible and outstretched, raised. She threw herself into the water and swam over.

I leaned towards her, and she put a blouse made of precious stones with hanging fringes on me, threads full of corals that covered my body. Beautiful and heavy like armour.

'Is it meant to be remembered?' I asked.

She touched my collarbone, as if counting something that could be lost.

Suddenly, it seemed to me that we were in water, separated, trapped in huge bubbles. It seemed to me that our mouths were moving without making a sound.

Underwater, Roman sandals were turning like clock hands. The crack of plastic. Stones covered my face, their weight pulling me to the bottom. 

I panic and call for help. Suddenly, I feel ashamed. The man on the phone says: 'I know where you are, you are at the beginning, ma'am, but if you are afraid, I can send someone.'

The bubbles dissolved in the water, and I felt even more ashamed.

'They're about to open the pool, and you'll remember this moment differently. Let's get out of here.' she said.

And I opened my eyes.