Chlorine and Old Regrets

The apartment complex pool sat empty at 2 AM, its surface still except for the occasional ripple from the wind. Maya perched on the edge, her legs submerged in water that felt too warm, like bathwater that had been sitting too long. She clutched a baseball cap in her hands — his baseball cap, the one he'd left behind three months ago when he walked out with nothing but a hastily packed duffel bag.

"You should take vitamin D," he'd told her during their last conversation, the one where he'd explained that he needed space, that space was a concept she couldn't seem to grasp. "You're always tired, Maya. Maybe it's not us. Maybe it's you."

She'd bought the vitamins the next day. She'd taken them religiously for six weeks, measuring her happiness in milligrams, waiting for the day when enough vitamin D would make her forget the way his laughter sounded when she did something unexpectedly silly.

The baseball team they'd followed together had made the playoffs this year. She'd watched the games alone, wearing his hat, feeling foolish and sentimental and angry all at once. The hat smelled like him still — cedar and old spice and the ghost of tobacco he'd quit two years into their relationship.

"Swimming helps," her sister had suggested over coffee last week. "The motion, the breath control. It's meditative."

So here she was, at an ungodly hour, about to go swimming in a pool that smelled too strongly of chlorine, with his hat resting on the concrete beside her like a small, woolen animal. She slid into the water, began swimming laps, counting strokes like she counted days since he'd left. Breaststroke, backstroke, butterfly — her muscles remembered the movements from childhood summers, from years before she'd met him, from a version of herself that felt increasingly distant.

Somewhere between lap twelve and thirteen, she realized she wasn't thinking about him anymore. The water buoyed her, held her weight. When she finally pulled herself out, dripping and exhausted, she left the hat behind on the pool deck.

Let whoever found it wonder who it belonged to. Let them make up their own stories.

The vitamins sat on her bathroom counter, half-empty bottle gathering dust. She'd stopped taking them weeks ago. It turned out some deficiencies couldn't be fixed with supplements."