The Pool Called Azure

The pool is called Lazurny, Azure, and it outlived its town: liquidators swam here into the nineties, a fact I find stranger than the emptiness itself. Then it too was left, and now the basin holds nothing but light from the tall windows and whatever snow drifts in.

I stood at the rim by the diving blocks. The depth markings are still legible. Somewhere under the debris lies the logic of ordinary afternoons: lanes, whistles, children racing to the ladder.

Empty pools are the most articulate ruins, because their purpose was joy and their geometry survives intact. Nothing to decode. You just stand at the edge of a shape that waits for water which is not coming.