Cable to Shore

The coaxial cable had been fraying for months, exposed copper winking at me like a secret I was too tired to keep. I should have called the provider, but that would have meant another hour on hold, another automated voice telling me my call mattered when we both knew it didn't.

Instead, I swam through my days like I swam through the apartment complex pool at night—breathless, submerged, cutting through water that couldn't quite wash off the office's residue. My mother called it my zombie phase: the way I moved through meetings, nodded at presentations, absorbed corporate bullshit about synergy and disruption while my actual life withered somewhere inside me.

"You're twenty-nine," she'd say, her voice thin with worry. "You used to have fire. Now you just have this... this look."

The look. The one that said I'd already seen everything worth seeing and found it wanting.

Then Lena transferred from accounting.

She found me by the pool one Tuesday, the night sky purple-black above us, water slicking back her dark hair. I'd never seen her there before—none of us ever left the building before nine, but there she was, swimming laps with fierce precision, cutting through the water like she had somewhere to be.

I watched from the lounge chair, beer forgotten in my hand. When she pulled herself from the pool, dripping, she caught me watching and didn't look away.

"The cable in my apartment died," she said, toweling her hair. "I couldn't sleep."

"Mine's been dead for weeks," I admitted, something loosening in my chest. "I keep forgetting to fix it."

She smiled then—not the polite work smile, but something crooked and real. "Maybe we forgot for a reason."

We sat by the pool until dawn, talking about everything that wasn't work. Her brother's addiction. My father's death. The way we'd both been moving through our lives like zombies, waiting for something to happen, something to break through the surface and make us feel again.

Lena reached for my hand across the concrete, her fingers cold from the water. "I've been taking swim lessons," she said softly. "My grandmother—she almost drowned once. Never learned. Made me promise I'd never be afraid."

The corporate bullshit felt suddenly, blissfully far away.

"Teach me," I said.

The first lesson was a week later. She showed me how to float on my back, trust the water to hold me up. I looked up at the ceiling, at the tangle of cables running across it, and realized I didn't need them anymore. I could swim.

"You're a bull in a china shop," she laughed, as I splashed us both, "but you're getting there."

I kissed her chlorine-salted mouth, my zombie heart finally, finally waking up.