Electric Current

The fluorescent lights of the office hummed their familiar headache-inducing tune as Maya swallowed her vitamin D supplement with a swig of lukewarm coffee. Another day of moving spreadsheets from one folder to another, her body present but her mind somewhere far away. She'd become a zombie of her own making—clock in, numb out, repeat.

That night, drawn by something she couldn't name, she found herself at the university pool at midnight. The swim pass she'd bought on January 1st and used twice burned a hole in her wallet. No one else was there. The water was still, dark as ink, reflecting nothing.

Swimming had always been her meditation, but lately she'd forgotten how to do anything but work. She slipped into the water, the sudden cold shocking her system awake. One stroke, two, three. Her muscles remembered what her mind had tried to erase.

Outside, a summer storm gathered. Lightning flickered across the windows, briefly illuminating the pool in flashes of blue-white. Each time the world went dark again, Maya felt more alone, and more herself, than she had in months.

She kept swimming, stroke after stroke, until her arms burned and her breath came short. This was what it meant to be alive—to feel something, even if it was exhaustion. Even if it was the stark realization that she'd been moving through her days like she was already dead.

A particularly brilliant fork of lightning struck somewhere nearby, the thunder rattling the windows. Maya stopped, treading water in the middle of the pool, hair plastered to her face, heart pounding. In that moment of suspended time, she understood what she had to do.

She quit her job the next morning. The zombie was dead. Something else—something that could feel, that could want, that could choose—was finally ready to begin.