Floating

The morning swim was the only time Marco felt human anymore. He'd slip into the university pool at 5:30, before the students arrived, before the emails, before the performance. The chlorine burned his eyes clean. Forty laps of backstroke, staring at the ceiling, pretending he was weightless.

Then came the office, where he moved through meetings like a zombie. He nodded at appropriate intervals. He synthesized other people's thoughts into action items. He'd stopped feeling anything about the work years ago; now he just executed the motions, hollowed out by the gentle erosion of meaning. His colleagues called him dependable. What they meant was dead inside.

His wife had left him six months ago. She'd packed her things while he was at a quarterly review. On the kitchen counter, she'd left his grandfather's fedora—the one she'd made him stop wearing to weddings because she said it made him look like she was dating her grandfather. He'd kept it on the counter ever since. Sometimes he put it on and stood in front of the mirror, trying to remember who he was before he became the person who would let something like that happen.

"You should start taking B12," his sister told him over dinner the previous week. She'd pushed a bottle across the table. "It helps with energy. With mood."

He'd bought them. They sat in his medicine cabinet,整齐排列 beside his antidepressants and the sleeping pills he no longer took because they made the mornings worse. He swallowed one every morning with his coffee, a small ritual of caring for the machine that kept moving him through the days.

Today, after his swim, he found himself in front of the hat again. He put it on. Something shifted. The zombie feeling receded, replaced by something sharper—grief, yes, but also recognition. He was still here. The machine hadn't won yet.

Marco called in sick. He drove to the ocean. The water was rough, salt stinging fresh-shaved skin, but he swam until his arms burned. When he finally emerged, gasping, he felt something like hope. He bought fish and chips from a stand. He ate them on the beach, wearing the fedora, not caring who stared. The vitamin could wait until tomorrow.