Most of my days were spent running myself ragged. A seahorse with a grin full of shiny white teeth that looked like dentures. You had to roll it along on its side like a giant hula hoop to move it anywhere. It was bright blue plastic - not inflatable, the rigid cheap stuff. She moved out not long afterward and took a lot of our things with her. My now ex-partner only got in the pool with me once, but after I got it set up in our backyard, I used it religiously. Buying a kiddie pool of my own felt like a throwback to a younger, simpler time. My grandparents bought a kiddie pool for my much younger cousin one summer, and I spent any time they’d let me sitting in it, the littler kids begging me to get out so they could play. That’s where I’d seen my first used condom, floating near the reedy lakefront, bloated as a dead jellyfish. There was no pool at our tiny rental home, no access to bodies of water other than the garbage-filled retention pond out back. Growing up, my family couldn’t afford much. To soak in a pool meant to truly chill the hell out. To me, it seemed like ideal enjoyment: a fun, cheap way to cool off and decompress. I set the kiddie pool on the back patio - a cracked slab of concrete that never got much shade - and filled it regularly with a busted old hose rigged with duct tape that I sometimes used to wash the dogs. A kiddie pool seemed perfect for me, a raccoon of a human who got her dinners most nights from the convenience store. Nicer homes have their own in-ground pools (and the requisite expenses that go along with keeping them clean). We live for excursions out to the springs, lakes, and oceans. One of the ways Floridians do that is by regularly throwing themselves into various bodies of water. Living in Orlando means getting used to the oppressive heat. We stuffed it in the back seat, wedged behind our heads alongside sweaty bags of food as we drove back home. I waited to grab one until we left, lugging it out to her car while she maneuvered the grocery cart. “It’s cheaper than going to the movies and we can use it over and over again,” I told my then-partner, and she reluctantly agreed. We were there for groceries after a very long, bad week of work, and suddenly a pool seemed like a necessity. The pools sat in a giant stack outside of the Walmart Supercenter next to a pile of bagged mulch and discount beach chairs. I barely had enough money at the time to put gas in my car, but I wanted the kiddie pool very badly.
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