Chlorine and Ash

Margaret stood at the edge of the hotel pool at 3 AM, the blue water glimmering like something you could drink if you were desperate enough. She'd been running for three months now—not just the morning laps around her neighborhood, but from the conversation she still couldn't bring herself to have.

Her mother's hair had started turning silver at thirty-five. Margaret found her first gray hair the morning Richard moved out. Now, at forty-two, she stood in this Tucson hotel pool, her vitamin routine the only thing keeping her tethered to something resembling routine. Vitamin D for the bones, B-complex for the nerves she was certain were fraying.

The pool's chlorine smell reminded her of summer camp, of being twelve and believing she'd never become the kind of woman who needed pills to function, who'd sleep alone in hotel rooms while her husband—ex-husband—whatever—dated someone named Lindsay who was probably twenty-seven and had never taken a vitamin in her life.

She'd started running because Richard said she'd seemed "stagnant." So she ran. She ran until her lungs burned, until her legs trembled, until she could convince herself that the physical pain was somehow different from the other kind.

The vitamin supplements sat on her bathroom counter in neat orange bottles. Each morning she swallowed them like small prayers, like promises that tomorrow she'd feel less like a house with all the furniture removed.

Margaret stepped into the pool. The water shocked her skin, waking everything up. She floated on her back, hair spreading around her like ink in water, and watched the desert stars through the glass ceiling. For the first time in months, she wasn't running from anything. She was just floating, chlorine and silence and the strange peace that comes when you finally stop pretending this isn't exactly where you are.