Dana Rodriguez for Vox

The pool was a place where I could think, but most importantly, it became a place where I didn’t have to think at all.

I barely had enough money at the time to put gas in my car, but I wanted the kiddie pool very badly. Needed it, really.

The pools sat in a giant stack outside of the Walmart Supercenter next to a pile of bagged mulch and discount beach chairs. We were there for groceries after a very long, bad week of work, and suddenly a pool seemed like a necessity.

“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. I waited to grab one until we left, lugging it out to her car while she maneuvered the grocery cart. We stuffed it in the back seat, wedged behind our heads alongside sweaty bags of food as we drove back home.

Living in Orlando means getting used to the oppressive heat. One of the ways Floridians do that is by regularly throwing themselves into various bodies of water. We live for excursions out to the springs, lakes, and oceans. Nicer homes have their own in-ground pools (and the requisite expenses that go along with keeping them clean). A kiddie pool seemed perfect for me, a raccoon of a human who got her dinners most nights from the convenience store. 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. To me, it seemed like ideal enjoyment: a fun, cheap way to cool off and decompress. Most of my days were spent running myself ragged. To soak in a pool meant to truly chill the hell out.

Growing up, my family couldn’t afford much. There was no pool at our tiny rental home, no access to bodies of water other than the garbage-filled retention pond out back. That’s where I’d seen my first used condom, floating near the reedy lakefront, bloated as a dead jellyfish. 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. Buying a kiddie pool of my own felt like a throwback to a younger, simpler time.

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. She moved out not long afterward and took a lot of our things with her. I got to keep the pool. It was bright blue plastic — not inflatable, the rigid cheap stuff. You had to roll it along on its side like a giant hula hoop to move it anywhere. It was covered with cartoon marine life. A seahorse with a grin full of shiny white teeth that looked like dentures. Fish wearing baseball caps. A starfish in sunglasses. It was so, so stupid. I loved it.