The Lady of the Lake

Not everything submerged wants to be saved.

They come before dawn. One by one, wrapped in neoprene or nothing at all. Heads bowed, shoulders hunched. Like pilgrims. Like offerings. Their breath cuts vapour trails across the water’s edge. No one speaks.

The lake is still, but not silent. Beneath the algae skin, the water hums. Frequencies too old for instruments. Too honest for measurement.

Some say cold-water swimming is a healing practice. Some say it shocks the soul awake. Others come simply to forget.

But none of them know she’s watching. The Lady.

Not a ghost. Not a goddess. Just the thing that remains when memory grows gills.

She’s been here longer than the lake.

Longer than the rubble of the old Art Deco baths they buried under the concrete edge like a guilty secret. She remembers the warm chlorinated summers, the packed galleries, the sun bouncing off glass bricks and bronzed skin. She remembers the scream of rebar as the demolition charge went off. She remembers the name that signed it.

They renamed the place. Repackaged it. Called it placemaking. But names mean nothing underwater. What is she? No one agrees.

Some say she’s a woman who swam too far and dissolved into myth. Others say she was born from a crack in the lakebed, data made flesh, crawling up through forgotten backup drives and silt.

An emergent thing. Not code, not creature. Pattern.

Sometimes she takes form. Most days, she is the form.

She waits until you’re chest-deep. Until your skin forgets it belongs to warmth. Until your breath becomes a prayer. And then, if your mind is quiet enough—

She speaks.

“You came here to feel. Then feel it. Every nerve. Every loss. Every choice you drowned in.”

There are swimmers who never return. Not missing—just changed.

They walk the promenade differently. They stop answering questions. They start asking better ones. They begin to speak of things that don’t exist yet, but feel inevitable.

One woman left her law firm and built a floating library. A retired electrician learned to sculpt in glass. One teenager started printing counterfeit currency with extinct birds on the notes. All of them said the same thing:

“She showed me where I’d hidden myself.”

Why was she buried?

Because they feared her.

Because the old pool had too many stories. Too many working-class bodies sharing space in a public dream. Too many memories that couldn’t be commodified.

Because she couldn’t be bought.

The men in suits came with permits and plans and smiles like wet concrete. They said the pool was unsafe. That it was time for something new. But new, in their mouths, always meant profit.

And so, she waited.

Not for revenge. For relevance.

And now?

Now the lake glows some mornings.

People say it’s phosphorescence. Some viral algae. But it pulses in time with breath. It listens.

A swimmer went under last winter and came back up laughing. Said he saw a ballroom down there, packed with dancers in 1930s swimwear, swaying in silence. Said they turned to look at him just before he surfaced.

Another saw floodlights. Old headlines made of steam. A girl doing butterfly stroke through clouds. Another saw nothing at all—until he looked inside himself and found the lake there too.

She is not yours.

She does not belong to the city.

She does not belong to history.

She does not belong to myth.

She is the part of you that remembers before remembering.

She is the freeze that resets the system.

The tear in the surface tension. The choice to feel. Even when it hurts.

Swim if you like.

Dive if you dare.

But understand:

The Lady of the Lake doesn’t grant wishes.

She grants clarity.

And not everyone survives it.

RW