The rocks are still cool from the night. I leave my towel, my camera wrapped in it like something precious and breakable, which it is, and I lower myself in. The water is that specific Ligurian cold that isn’t cruel but isn’t kind either. It just is. Your chest tightens, your breath shortens, and then something releases. You stop being a person with a schedule. You become temperature.
Riomaggiore is stacked above me in pinks and yellows and that particular burnt orange that my father’s family would call arancione vecchio, old orange, the color of shutters nobody has repainted since before I was born. From down here at the waterline the village looks like it’s leaning forward, curious, watching the sea the way it has for centuries. No one is on the path yet. No selfie sticks, no guided groups with matching headsets. Just me, a few gulls working the thermals, and the quiet slap of water against stone.
I swim out maybe thirty meters. Not far. Far enough that the sounds of the village, a door, a radio, a pot placed on a stove, become soft and indistinct. The salt is thick here, you float without trying. I turn onto my back and the sky is that blue you forget exists when you’ve been in cities too long. Not dramatic, not postcard blue. Just ordinary, depthless, early morning blue. It smells like iodine and basil, which makes no sense except it does, because someone up in those colored walls is already cooking and the breeze carries it down to the water.
I think about how swimming alone in a cold sea is the closest thing I know to silence. Not the absence of sound. There’s plenty of sound. But the silence inside, where the planning stops and the listing stops and you are just a warm body in cold water, looking up. I’ll dry off on the rocks. I’ll load a fresh roll. The day-trippers will arrive by ten, maybe earlier. But right now this is mine, and I don’t mean that in a possessive way. I mean it the way you mean it when you catch something brief and know it. The way you cup water in your hands and watch it go.
