Cable to Nowhere

The morning her husband left, Elena went swimming in the bay. Not for exercise—she'd never been the athletic type—but because the cold shocked her numb. At 6 AM, the Pacific bit into her skin like teeth. She dove until her lungs burned, surfaced gasping, dove again. Anything to feel something besides the hollow echo in her chest.

Three weeks later, she sat on her living room floor surrounded by Comcast's aftermath: a tangle of black coaxial cable that Nathan had disconnected the night before his final departure. The cable guy—twentysomething, name tag read KYLE—stood in her doorway, tool belt jangling.

"You got a dog?" he asked, nodding at the clump of golden hair caught in the cable's braided shielding.

"Had." The word scraped her throat. "He took Buster when he moved out. Said the dog needed a yard."

Kyle didn't ask what else Nathan had taken. He didn't need to. The apartment was half-empty: his gaming chair gone, his espresso machine, his laugh from the hallway.

She watched Kyle work. His fingers were deft, practiced. He replaced fittings, tightened connections, tested signal strength on a little handheld device. Efficient. Unsentimental. The opposite of her life right now.

"All set," he said, testing the remote. CNN flickered to life—she'd left it on that channel the morning Nathan said he'd fallen out of love with her. Not fallen. Drifted, he'd corrected, like drift was any less final.

"Thanks," she said, and meant it.

He packed up, paused at the door. "My ex took my cat. Said she couldn't afford pet deposits alone. But really? She just wanted to hurt me."

Elena laughed, startled. It hurt. "Did it work?"

"Yeah. Still does."

After he left, she sat on her couch and watched people argue about politics on a screen. Behind her, that golden hair still clung to the cable like proof of a life she'd lived. Tomorrow she'd cut it free. Tomorrow she'd go swimming again. Tonight, she let herself remember how Nathan used to twine her hair around his fingers while they watched movies, how he'd called her mermaid whenever she came up from underwater, sleek and shining.

Tomorrow she'd be someone who'd moved on. Tonight, she was someone who'd almost built a life, once, and wasn't sure how to start over when the foundation had given way.