Pool Light at Midnight

She found herself at the pool again, running on fumes and three hours of sleep. The divorce papers sat on her kitchen counter, unsigned. Mark had moved out two weeks ago, taking the furniture, the dog, and leaving behind a goldfish bowl with one surviving inhabitant—a preposterous orange creature she'd named Barry.

Now she floated on her back, the pool water cool against her skin, staring up at the apartment complex's security light. It cast strange shadows across the water's surface. She thought about the wilted spinach in her refrigerator, how she kept buying fresh vegetables out of habit, cooking meals for one instead of two.

Barry the goldfish had died yesterday. She'd flushed him without ceremony, feeling absurdly guilty about a fish that had survived Mark's departure only to succumb to her negligence. It felt like a metaphor—something about how she kept things alive just enough, how she was running on autopilot through a life she no longer recognized.

Her phone buzzed on the pool deck. Mark, probably. Or her mother asking if she'd signed the papers yet. She let it ring.

"You okay out there?"

A voice from the balcony above. She turned to see her neighbor—what was his name? Elias?—leaning over the railing, cigarette glowing in the darkness. She'd never spoken to him beyond polite nods in the hallway.

"Just thinking," she said.

"About goldfish?" he asked.

She laughed, startled. "How did you know?"

"I saw you carrying the bowl to the bathroom. Looked heavy for a fish."

He came down to the pool deck, sat on the edge, feet dangling in the water. They talked until dawn—about his dead-end job, her stalled legal career, about the way grief was just love with nowhere to go.

"I'm supposed to be running toward something," she said finally as the sky began to lighten. "Instead I'm just treading water."

"Maybe that's okay for now," Elias said. "Maybe you just need to float."

She watched the first rays hit the pool surface, thought about the spinach in her fridge, about going to the grocery store today. About how Barry hadn't suffered, really. How sometimes ending was its own kind of beginning.