Conducting Current

I sat on the balcony, ethernet cable coiled around my ankles like a dead snake, watching the lightning stitch itself across the Dallas skyline in jagged veins of white. My laptop screen glowed with the presentation I'd been rewriting since 9 PM, the one that would determine whether my team survived the Q3 cuts.

My phone buzzed on the glass table. Sarah. Again.

I'd stopped answering after she said she needed "space" — the corporate euphemism for "I've already started seeing someone else, I just haven't told you yet." But the messages kept coming, each one another loop in the cable tightening around my throat.

The hotel pool below me was empty, the water still and black as obsidian. A single security lamp cast a pale yellow oval on the concrete, and for a moment I considered going down there — stripping off my work clothes and slipping into that void, letting the water hold me the way Sarah used to before everything became complicated, before her job in Seattle and this promotion that required me to be in Dallas three weeks a month, before we'd become two people who loved each other but couldn't stand what the other was becoming.

Another flash of lightning cracked the sky, closer this time. I counted the seconds until thunder rattled the balcony door. One, two, three — barely two miles away.

The ethernet cable had come loose from my laptop. The presentation was frozen, unsaved, caught in the moment between connection and loss. Just like us.

I found myself at the edge of the pool, barefoot on the concrete, the storm's humidity thick in my lungs. The water reflected the lightning back at me, a fractured mirror of everything I couldn't hold onto. I thought about how Sarah had always said we were like electricity — she was the lightning, brilliant and destructive, and I was the cable, trying desperately to conduct her safely to ground without burning everything down.

She was right about the ending, at least. Some things can't be transmitted without being lost along the way.

I didn't get in the pool. I stood there watching the storm break apart the sky, feeling the distance between Dallas and Seattle, between who I was and who she needed, between the lightning and the ground it was trying to reach.