Chlorine and Goodbyes

The water in the pool was impossibly blue, the kind of blue that didn't exist in nature—only in places where people paid to forget themselves. Elena sat on the edge, legs dangling in, watching her friend Marie apply sunscreen with the methodical precision of someone who had nothing left to lose.

"You're going to burn," Marie said, not looking up from her arm.

"Let me burn."

Elena thought about the vitamin D supplements on her bathroom counter, the ones her doctor had prescribed after the blood work came back abnormal. Everything in her body was deficient or excessive. Balance had become a foreign concept.

"He's not coming, is he?" Marie's voice was flat.

"No."

"You still have his key."

"I know."

Marie finished with her arms and moved to her legs. The palm trees around the pool's perimeter cast long shadows across the concrete. They were the wrong kind of palms for this climate—imported, expensive, struggling.

"Remember when we came here that summer after graduation?" Marie asked suddenly. "Before everything got complicated."

"We were idiots."

"Happy idiots."

Elena slipped into the water, letting it close over her head. The silence was instantaneous and complete. For a moment, she could pretend the world above didn't exist—no job that demanded more than she could give, no relationship that had dissolved into resentment and silence, no body that felt increasingly like a stranger she couldn't trust.

When she surfaced, Marie was watching her.

"You're shivering," Marie said.

"I'm alive."

"Same thing."

A waiter approached with two drinks on a tray. Marie waved him away. They sat in the quiet, surrounded by the chatter of strangers, the sound of children splashing, the relentless sun moving across the sky.

"I started seeing someone," Marie said. "A therapist, actually. She says I need to stop fixing people who don't want to be fixed."

Elena laughed. The sound surprised her. "That's convenient."

"I know. But she also said something else. She said sometimes the most caring thing you can do is walk away."

The water lapped against the pool's edge, a gentle rhythm against the concrete. Elena closed her eyes. Behind them, the sun was a red stain on the inside of her eyelids.

"Stay with me tonight," she said.

"Okay."

They sat as the shadows lengthened, two friends in the water, waiting for something to change, or maybe just for the courage to change it themselves.