Chlorine Secrets

I swim laps at 5 AM because the water doesn't ask questions. The pool is a sphinx of chlorinated silence—smooth, impenetrable, holding all the secrets I can't speak aloud. My strokes cut through the blue dark, counting them like rosary beads for sins I haven't committed yet.

Sarah sent me a text last night. "Found your old vitamin bottles. Want them back?"

The vitamins were yours—the ones you swore would fix everything. The ones that sat on our shared bathroom counter, a promise to ourselves that we'd get better, together. We'd take them with morning coffee, those little capsules of optimism, while you told me about your therapy sessions and I told you about my deadlines.

We called ourselves friends, but that word feels flimsy now, like tissue paper wrapped around something jagged. The truth is more complicated: we were each other's emotional ventriloquists, speaking through the other's mouth because our own voices had grown rusty from disuse.

You were like a sphinx, always posing riddles I couldn't solve: "Why are you staying with him?" "What do you actually want?" "Why do you let people walk all over you?" Your questions felt like tests I couldn't pass, and the more I failed, the more certain I became that you enjoyed watching me struggle.

The vitamins your text mentioned—I don't want them back. They were placebos anyway, little lies we told ourselves about growth and healing. Real change doesn't come in capsule form.

I reach the wall, breathless, and push off again. In the mirror above, I catch my own reflection—some stranger learning to swim alone, some answer finally taking shape in the space between breaststroke and survival. The sphinx offers no riddles today. Just water, and the rhythm of my own arms, and the certainty that this time, I'm the one doing the saving.