Drifting at the Marina

The iPhone lay on the nightstand, its screen lighting up every few minutes with emails Mark should have answered three days ago. He watched it from where he sat on the edge of the hotel bed, his padel racket leaning against the wall beside his open suitcase. The championship started in two hours. His partner, Elena, would be furious if he didn't show.

But Mark couldn't move.

Yesterday's call still echoed in his mind—his mother's voice, paper-thin and crackling, telling him the hospice nurse said maybe days now. Maybe hours. He'd booked the first flight, then cancelled it when Sarah said they couldn't afford the time off work. That was three months ago. His mother was still waiting, and so was he.

He stood up and walked to the balcony instead. Below, the Mediterranean lapped against the marina's stone walls. The water looked impossibly blue, almost artificial. Guests were already down by the pool—laughter, the clink of glasses, someone shouting about a game of water volleyball. Normal people. People who didn't feel like they were moving through life underwater.

That's what his therapist called it before Mark stopped going. "Emotional numbness. You're sleepwalking, Mark. A zombie of your own making."

The word had stung. Zombie. Something that used to be human but wasn't anymore.

His phone buzzed again. Elena: WHERE ARE YOU we're up at 10

Mark typed: Coming. Then deleted it. Typed: Something came up. Deleted that too.

He set the phone on the balcony railing. The morning air smelled of salt and coffee and sunscreen. Far below, a figure emerged from the pool—water streaming down a woman's back, droplets catching the sunlight like diamonds. She was laughing, head thrown back, alive in a way Mark couldn't remember being.

He thought about his mother, who used to swim every morning at dawn. How she'd drag him out of bed at five AM, the two of them cutting through the cold water together while the sky turned pink. "This is living, Mark," she'd say, gasping and grinning. "This is what it feels like to be truly alive."

That was before. Before the divorce, before the distance, before he became someone who scheduled time to grieve.

Mark picked up his iPhone. He scrolled past the work emails, past Elena's increasingly frantic messages, and found his mother's number. It had been six weeks since they'd spoken.

The phone rang three times. "Mark?"

Her voice sounded exactly the same. Not paper-thin at all.

"Mom," he said. "I'm coming home."

"Mark?" She hesitated. "Is everything okay?"

"No," he said, surprising himself. "But I think it might be."

Down by the pool, the woman shook her hair out like a dog, spraying water everywhere. Someone shouted something about jumping in, and then there was a splash, then another, like people remembering how to be children again.

Mark watched as his padel racket caught the morning light through the glass door. He wouldn't be needing it.

He'd go swimming instead.