Empty Courts

The padel court echoed with the ghost of a ball that never landed. I checked my watch again—3:14 PM. Marcos wasn't coming.

Three weeks ago, we'd been here every Sunday, chasing down shots that should've been impossible, laughing when we missed, celebrating when our bodies remembered what our minds had forgotten. At forty-two, you don't make new friends. You inherit the ones you've already got, casualties of divorces and career changes and the slow drift of lives pulling in different directions.

I'd found Marcos again—or the version of him that still existed—fifteen years after college. We were different men now. He sold software to hospitals. I wrote copy for brands that wanted to seem authentic. Both of us running, always running, from something we couldn't name.

The padel games had been his idea. Something about recapturing our twenties, when we'd played baseball every summer Sunday in the park behind his apartment complex. Those games had ended the way things do: one week nobody showed, then nobody showed again. No final game, no farewell inning. Just entropy.

'You're still thinking about Elena,' he'd said last week, as we sat on the bench between sets, sweat cooling on our skin. It wasn't a question. We were friends, the kind who could say the things that hurt.

'She left seven months ago.' I'd tied my shoes with unnecessary precision. 'People leave.'

'Some people stay,' he'd said. Then his phone had buzzed, and he'd smiled in that way—the soft, terrifying way of someone who'd found something that might actually work. 'I have to go. Sarah's waiting.'

The padel racket felt heavy in my hand. I wasn't angry about Sarah. I wasn't angry about the divorce, not anymore. What I couldn't name was this: watching someone choose to stay, when you'd finally learned that nobody ever does.

I picked up my bag and headed toward the parking lot, running shoes slapping against pavement. Not running toward anything. Not running away. Just running, the way we all are, until we stop.