Across the partition is a pool of ice cold water. Your body rejects it when you hop in, but then you submerge your head in it and the temperature begins to seem natural. You sit in it for a couple minutes. There is unmitigated delight, though, across the way so you step around a water bottle and a few beers and dip again into the steaming hot spring. People are holding their white cans from the bottom so their hands don’t have to emerge from the water. I want to sigh in pleasure every six seconds when I understand the warmth I’m enfolded in. It rains beyond the slanted corrugated hot spring cover. The concrete is cold to feet. These things are irrelevant as they never have been. Speedos and bikinis are worn. Glasses are fogged up. People without sitting spots kneel in the center of the spring.
Clusters shift and bask.
Warmth. Warmth. Warmth.
Ahhhhhh…. sounds wondeful.
Wonderful too.