Breathing Underwater

The divorce papers sat on the kitchen counter for three weeks before Marcus noticed. He'd been too busy with his new padel league, every Tuesday and Thursday evening, and sometimes Saturday mornings when Sarah was at gymnastics. He'd come home smelling of expensive cologne and sweat, eyes bright with something I hadn't seen in years.

'You're like a zombie,' he'd told me once, six months ago, when I still cried. 'Just going through the motions, Lenora. You need to get out more. Do something.'

So I started swimming. Every morning at 5:30, before the world woke up, before Marcus's phone began to buzz with work emergencies and padel group chats. The Y pool was cold and dim, the only light filtering through high windows like ghosts. I'd swim laps until my muscles burned, until the water became the only thing that felt real.

The cat, Bast, watched everything. She'd sit on the bathroom counter while I applied makeup I no longer believed in, her golden eyes unblinking. Marcus hated cats—called them needy, unpredictable—but I'd found her as a kitten during our second year of marriage, when we still thought love was something you found rather than something you built. She slept on my side of the bed now, a warm, breathing presence in the hollow space between us.

'I'm leaving,' I said last night. No preamble, no dramatics. Marcus was scrolling through his phone, looking at padel tournament brackets.

He looked up, confused. 'What? For work?'

'No, Marcus. Leaving.'

The silence stretched. He set down his phone. 'Is this about the cologne? Sheila gave it to me for our work anniversary. It's not—'

'It's not about the cologne.' Though it was, and wasn't. It was about the way he'd started looking at me like I was furniture, like I was something that had always been there and would always remain, while he was alive somewhere else. While he was playing padel and laughing at inside jokes I wasn't part of.

I signed the papers this morning. Bast watched from the windowsill as I packed a suitcase. Marcus hasn't come home yet—probably at the courts, playing doubles with someone who makes him feel seen. Tomorrow morning I'll swim at my new pool, in my new apartment. I'll go underwater and hold my breath, and for those few seconds, I'll remember what it felt like to choose something.