Late Sunday at the Padel Court

The fluorescent lights of the indoor court hummed like a dying cicara as Elena smashed the padel racket against the plexiglass wall. The sound echoed through the empty space, violent and satisfying. Her partner, Mateo's brother, flinched but said nothing. He knew better by now.

"Your backhand is getting better," he offered, tossing her a fresh ball.

Elena wiped sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. "That's not what I'm angry about."

No, the anger was older and deeper than a missed shot or a lost game. Three weeks since Mateo had walked out of their apartment with nothing but a duffel bag and that insufferable calmness of someone who's been planning their exit for months. Three weeks of sleeping in sheets that still smelled faintly of his cologne, of reaching for a coffee mug that wasn't there, of realizing she'd forgotten what silence sounded like before someone else filled it.

Back at her apartment, her cat, Bento, wound around her ankles with demanding meows. He'd been eating more since Mateo left—maybe the animal sensed the vacuum in the apartment, the sudden surplus of affection and attention. Elena poured his food automatically, then opened her own cupboard and stared at the colorful array of supplements. Vitamin D for the winter gloom, magnesium for sleep, B-complex for energy. Mateo had always teased her about her "pharmacy collection," said she was trying to solve emotional problems with chemistry.

She swallowed three capsules without water, dry and deliberate.

The truth was, she didn't know if the vitamins helped. But taking them felt like control, like agency, like something concrete in a world that had suddenly gone liquid and strange. Like practicing her padel serve at midnight when she couldn't sleep.

Bento jumped onto the counter and headbutted her hand, purring loudly. Elena buried her face in his soft fur and breathed him in. The cat didn't care that she was thirty-four and starting over. The cat didn't care that her carefully planned future had dissolved like sugar in hot tea. The cat only cared that she was here, that she was warm, that she would eventually feed him again.

"We're okay," she whispered into his orange striped side. "We're going to be okay."

Outside, the city lights flickered through the window, thousands of strangers going about their unknowable lives. Elena picked up her phone and scrolled through the contacts until she found her sister's name. Tomorrow she would call. Tomorrow she would make an appointment with a therapist instead of swallowing handfuls of vitamins.

Tonight, she would pet her cat and accept that some things couldn't be fixed with practice or patience or pills. Some things just had to be lived through until they became something else entirely.