Everything We've Lost to Gravity

The softball sailed toward me in what felt like slow motion, a white comet against the bruising purple sky. My dog, Buster, had died three days before this company retreat — pancreatic cancer, the vet said, as if that made it better — and here I was, expected to care about a intramural championship.

"You've got this, Elena!" Marcus called from first base. My ex-husband. The man who'd left me for a twenty-six-year-old marketing coordinator who still used the word "like" as punctuation.

I didn't have this. The ball — regulation baseball, pristine and indifferent — dropped untouched into my glove. Something broke loose in my chest, hot and wild.

"Jesus, Elena," our manager said afterward in the conference room. "That was the championship." He pointed to the whiteboard where he'd written our quarterly goals in aggressive Sharpie. "We talked about this. You don't let the big one get away. You have to be the bull in the china shop. Go for the jugular."

"It's just a game,"

He laughed. "That's what losers say."

I walked to the lake behind the hotel, needing water between my fingers, something real and cool. The company had rented a bear costume for some team-building exercise that nobody had wanted to participate in. It lay deflated on the shore, its plastic face staring up at me with dead, glossy eyes.

Marcus found me there. "You okay?"

I looked at the water, dark and unknowable. "I let it drop on purpose."

"The ball?"

"Everything. My dog died, Marcus. I didn't even tell you." My voice cracked. "I put him down on Tuesday and came to this retreat on Wednesday because I need this job. I need this job to pay for the dog I no longer have."

He didn't know what to say. Of course he didn't. We were thirty-four years old, standing in business casual attire beside a lake, discussing mortality and softball and the exhausting architecture of adult life.

"Maybe," he said finally, "sometimes losing is the only way to feel something real."

I watched the water lap against the shore. "Maybe. Or maybe we're all just pretending there's a point to any of it."

The deflated bear bobbed slightly in the wind. A metaphor for something. For everything.

"Want to get a drink?" he asked.

"Yes," I said. "God, yes."

And for the first time in three days, I didn't feel like I was drowning.