Dead Things Don't Float

Elena stood before the bathroom mirror, running her fingers through hair that had begun its slow migration from chestnut to silver. At forty-two, she hadn't expected to mourn her youthful appearance so viscerably, but there it was — another small death in a year of them.

In the kitchen, Buster whined at his bowl. The golden retriever, now seventeen and arthritic, was the only living thing that still looked at her with something resembling love. Mark had left eight months ago, citing her emotional unavailability, which was rich coming from a man who communicated primarily through passive-aggressive Post-it notes.

"Spinach again?" Buster seemed to say with his rheumy eyes. She dumped the wilted greens into his bowl, watching him eat with the enthusiasm of an animal who had long ago learned that disappointment was just hunger deferred.

Her phone buzzed — another Slack notification from the startup where she managed a team of developers half her age. They called themselves zombies, affectionately, wearing their burnout like a badge of honor. Elena had stopped correcting them. Real zombies didn't know they were dead, and she was beginning to understand the appeal of that particular ignorance.

She drove to the community center for her Tuesday evening swim, the only hour she felt something approaching peace. The chlorine smell, the rhythmic lap of water against tile, the way her body became weightless — it was the closest she came to prayer now. Her coworker Sarah, thirty-two and terrifyingly vital, joined her sometimes, talking about dating apps and corporate ladders with an intensity that made Elena's teeth ache.

"You seem lonely," Sarah had said last week, with the well-meaning cruelty of the young.

In the pool tonight, Elena pushed off the wall, stroke after stroke, until her muscles burned. She thought about Mark, about the way he'd stopped touching her long before he left. She thought about her mother, dead three years, whose memory was beginning to feel like someone else's story. She thought about the way Buster leaned against her leg when she cried, this good animal who loved her without agenda.

Later, wrapped in a towel, she watched the water's surface smooth itself over, erasing all evidence of her passage. A dead thing floats, she remembered someone saying once. But maybe some things just learn to move through the darkness without needing to see where they're going.

Buster was waiting by the door when she got home, and for the first time in months, Elena didn't feel like she was faking her way through being alive.