What do you lose when the pool goes quiet?

It’s 4:30 a.m. and the water’s still. Not empty—just waiting. I’ve been standing here for twenty minutes, watching the last ripple fade into the concrete. The silence isn’t nothing. It’s something thick, like the air after someone says goodbye but doesn’t turn around. I keep thinking: what does the pool remember? Not the swimmers, not the splashes—but the spaces between, the breaths held before diving in. What do we lose when the sound stops? Or is it just that we finally hear what was always there?