Pool journal

Him, bald. With a black moustache with gray stains, like white hairs. Summer clothes. Her, with glasses. Both very tanned. Just like any other couple, with their backpack and sitting on a bench at the edge of the pool. Apart from that she is covered from head to toe. Baggy trousers, shirt even more baggy, all the way to her knee, and a scarf against her head and neck.

A girl runs towards them. “My glasses, quick, give me my glasses!” The mother replies in a foreign language, speaking very fast. The girl, in a swimsuit of bright colors, very tanned, very long black hair, finds her glasses and runs to the pool she had come out from. The mother has not stopped talking to her, louder and faster, it seems that she is telling her off. Just before jumping into the pool, she turns and shouts to the mother, “¡Que sí!”

And I look at him, so like any Spanish at the edge of the pool. And at her, of garments so different from all the garments. And at the girl, who has already blended in the pool with the rest of the nearly naked bodies.

And I wonder what her choice will be, when she is told, or not, that she can no longer wear a swimming suit like her friends. I wonder how will be the moment when she will have to choose between being different from her friends or different from her family. If they will have similar or vastly different moments to our “You are not going out like that”.