Electric Current

The rain was coming down in sheets, blurring the city lights through the window of her 12th-floor apartment. Maya stood at the sink, filling a glass with water, her hands trembling slightly. She hadn't been sleeping well since the separation—three weeks of restless nights and boxes she couldn't bring herself to unpack.

Her iPhone lit up the dark kitchen with its familiar glow. Another message from David: "Can we talk?"

Maya stared at the screen. They'd been together seven years. She'd met him when she was twenty-three, still taking prenatal vitamins her mother kept mailing her, as if she could somehow pill her way into the woman her mother wanted her to become. Now she was thirty, and the only thing she was pregnant with was the weight of all the decisions she hadn't made.

She'd started running again—5Ks at dawn, her sneakers hitting the wet pavement while the city slept around her. Her friend Sarah said it was avoidance. Maya preferred to call it momentum.

Lightning cracked across the sky, a sudden white scar through the darkness. The power flickered, then died, plunging her into a silence she'd been avoiding for weeks. No refrigerator hum. No notifications. Just the sound of her own breathing and the rain still drumming against the glass.

In the bathroom mirror, she barely recognized herself. The woman looking back had hollow eyes and something like resolve simmering beneath them. She opened the medicine cabinet and stared at the neatly organized rows of vitamins she took religiously every morning—D, B-complex, iron, omega-3. An insurance policy against a future she wasn't sure she wanted.

Sarah had told her last week over drinks: "You're not lost, Maya. You're just becoming someone else."

Her phone buzzed again, its face illuminating the darkness. David's name, one more time.

Maya picked up the device, her thumb hovering over the screen. Outside, another flash of lightning illuminated the room, and for a moment, she saw everything with terrible clarity. She wasn't running away from David. She was running toward something she couldn't yet name.

She typed back: "No. But I'll meet you for coffee on Thursday. To sign the papers."

Then she turned off the phone, set it on the counter, and stood there in the darkness, listening to the rain, finally ready to begin.