Cable Management

The apartment was silent except for the hum of servers in the next room. Maria sat on the floor, untangling a knot of ethernet cables like prayer ropes in a monastery for atheists. She'd been working from home for three years now, a digital zombie stumbling through Zoom meetings and Slack threads, her actual body becoming a distant relative she visited only for meals and bathroom breaks.

Her hair had begun to thin, which she'd noticed during the pandemic when she caught her reflection in the dark monitor at 3 AM. Stress, her mother said. The pediatrician said something similar when she was seven and her hair fell out in clumps—too much worry for a little girl, should go outside more, play baseball like the neighbor kids. She'd never learned to hit a ball. She'd learned to code instead.

The apartment door opened. David walked in, dropping his gym bag on the floor. He'd started going to the gym again, trying to build himself back into something solid after his startup burned through two million dollars and his dignity along with it.

"Still untangling?" He kissed the top of her head, his breath smelling of spearmint and exhaustion.

"It's the third time this month." She held up a particularly stubborn knot. "Feel like I'm just rearranging the same chaos over and over."

David sat beside her, taking the cables from her hands. "You know what my father used to say? 'Life is just trying to stay ahead of the bull.'"

"That's terrifying."

"He was a terrifying man." David worked at the knot, his fingers deft, patient. "But the point was—you can't outrun it forever. Eventually you have to decide whether to let it gore you or grab it by the horns."

"That's so many mixed metaphors."

"He was full of bull, too." David finally loosened the knot. The cable fell straight, a perfect line between his hands. He looked at her, really looked at her, in a way he hadn't in months. "I got an offer today. In Austin. It's good, Maria. It's—"

She saw the sentence forming before he spoke it: it's a fresh start. it's a second chance. it's not this.

"Baseball season starts in April," she said instead. "We could go. To a game. Like normal people."

David smiled, and something broke in her chest. "Yeah. We could be normal people."

The cables lay straight between them, tamed for now. They both knew the knots would return. They always did.