Chlorine and Silence

The divorce papers sat on the kitchen counter next to a bowl of oranges, their bright peels mocking me with cheerfulness. Mark had always liked oranges—said they reminded him of better times in Florida, before the mortgage and the promotions and the slow erosion of whatever we'd once been.

My phone buzzed. Another text from Sarah, my oldest friend, asking if I was okay. I stared at the iphone screen, watching the typing dots appear and disappear. She didn't know how to ask the real question: *Are you ever coming back?*

I walked to the backyard pool. The water was still—Mark's last weekend project before he moved out. He'd spent days perfecting the pH balance, testing the chlorine levels with scientific precision, while I sat inside drinking wine and wondering when we'd stopped being able to talk about anything that mattered.

The pool reflected the twilight sky, turning the water a deep indigo. I remembered our tenth anniversary dinner, how he'd reached across the table and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, his fingers lingering on my cheek. That tenderness had died so gradually I hadn't noticed its absence until it was gone.

Now his hair—or what remained of it—was probably cut by someone else. His iphone probably had a new lock screen, maybe some woman who didn't remember when he used to write me poems on post-it notes.

I peeled an orange, the citrus scent sharp in the cooling air. The segmented flesh was perfect, geometric, unlike anything in my life right now. I ate it standing at the pool's edge, watching the first stars appear, and thought about how Sarah had once told me that grief was just love with nowhere to go.

The phone buzzed again. *I'm coming over,* she'd written. *With wine and oranges.*

I didn't respond. Some things you have to let dissolve into silence, like chlorine in water, like everything we used to be.