Dog Paddle

The dog—Barnaby, a golden retriever mix with eyes like molten caramel—sat by the sliding glass door, waiting. He always waited when I went to the pool. My therapist called it my 'weekly baptism.' I called it the only hour I didn't want to crawl out of my skin.

Three months since the funeral. Two months since Mark moved out. One month since I'd bothered to shave my legs regularly.

I slipped into the water, and silence swallowed me whole. Swimming had become my church. No emails, no well-meaning friends asking if I'd tried the new grief support group, no carefully curated Instagram feeds of everyone living their best lives while I dried out like an old sponge. Just the rhythmic lap of water against my ears, the slow expansion and contraction of my own lungs.

Back home, Barnaby greeted me with his usual enthusiasm, as if I'd been to war and returned victorious. I fed him, then stared at my own dinner: a wilted pile of spinach, some grilled chicken. Everything the internet said I should eat to keep my serotonin levels adequate. Spinach. The vegetable that tasted like resignation.

'You're too young to be this tired,' my mother had said yesterday, pushing a bottle of vitamin D supplements into my hands during her unannounced visit. 'Your father takes these. They help with mood.' She'd looked at my apartment, at the half-unpacked boxes, at Barnaby's toys scattered across the floor like broken promises. 'Maybe you should get a smaller place. Something fresh.'

I'd nodded. She meant well. Everyone meant well.

The dog nudged my hand, and I scratched behind his ears—his spot, the one that made his back leg thump rhythmically against the floorboards. Barnaby didn't care about vitamin deficiencies or career trajectories or whether I'd ever feel like myself again. Barnaby just cared that I was here, that I fed him, that sometimes I lay on the couch and let him use my stomach as a pillow while I watched terrible television until 3 AM.

I swallowed one of the vitamins my mother had left. Washed it down with wine, because I was thirty-two, not dead, and some rules were meant to be bent. Tomorrow I'd do better. Tomorrow I'd call the therapist back. Tomorrow I'd unpack the boxes in the guest room that still held Mark's books.

Barnaby whined softly, resting his chin on my knee.

'I know,' I whispered. 'Me too.'

Outside, the October rain began to fall, and for the first time in months, I didn't wish I was underwater.