The Pool at the LINE

Maya Binyam writes the first installment of the column I Come Here Often, from LARB Quarterly no. 44: “Pressure.”

By Maya BinyamJuly 17, 2025

• LARB Lit

• Memoir & Essay

This essay, from the ongoing print column I Come Here Often, is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 44: Pressure. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

¤

MOST DAYS are bad days. That’s just the way it is right now. I used to tell people I wanted to live as long as possible. I wasn’t even joking; I actually had a psychological investment in the passage of time. Lately, one day is enough. One day is actually more than enough. By the afternoon, I regret the morning. I start to hope that my life might develop the capacity to move in a backward direction.

Walks help. The LINE is 20 minutes from my apartment. The LINE is a hotel that doesn’t really look like anything. It has rooms but I haven’t seen them; the rooms are beside the point. Usually, when I go, I’m wearing something incredibly stupid. I catch my reflection in the mirror behind the concierge desk and think: “I can’t believe she left the house looking like that.” Los Angeles is good for feeling ugly but sort of remote about it, as if your ugliness is a phenomenon that’s happening to somebody else.

Luckily, it doesn’t matter what I look like. I’m not a guest. I’m an interloper, I’m there to sneak into the pool. The pool is on the third floor. It’s not quite on the rooftop, but it’s rooftop-adjacent, about as close to the rooftop as a woman wearing platform Crocs could ever hope to get.

For a long time, sneaking into the pool wasn’t actually necessary. No one monitored anything up there. From far away, the guests looked young, but up close I could tell they were old; I could tell that they had tried to eradicate experience from their faces. I didn’t have a right to judge them. They had a right to be there.

Time became interesting at the pool, because I could measure it by the movement of the sun. My apartment doesn’t have a view of that stuff. In my apartment, time is a collection of pixels that rearrange themselves on my phone. Life at the pool was tethered to other planets; it operated according to an idiosyncratic, celestial logic. The horizon was a billboard. Sunsets happened early. Sunsets happened when the sun dipped behind an image of elderly people who had contracted STIs.

I switched into the past tense because it turned out my days at the LINE were numbered. They instituted a guests-only policy and started to enforce it. A private security guard patrolled the pool’s perimeter, asking to see key cards. He said he was acting on behalf of the city, that the city had issued a special ordinance to deal with people like me. In my dreams. It wasn’t ceremonious, getting kicked out. I walked home. The sun still set. I just didn’t see it happen.

¤

Featured image courtesy of Maya Binyam.