Pool of Regrets

The pool at midnight, chlorine and cheap wine. Elena sat on the edge, legs dangling in water that felt like surrender. She'd been coming here since David moved out three months ago, the apartment complex's pool her confessional.

"You're going to turn into a goldfish," David had joked, watching her float for hours during their first summer together. "All that water, you'll sprout gills."

Instead, she'd sprouted doubt. Little by little, scaling the pyramid of his excuses: busy at work, tired, not ready for anything serious. The classic bullshit, but she'd swallowed it like the carnival goldfish he'd won her that lived three weeks in a bowl on her nightstand.

The goldfish had more backbone than she did.

"Hey." A voice from the shadows. Mark, her neighbor. The friend who'd listened to every iteration of the David saga, who'd brought her soup when she was sick and told her, "That man's using you like an ATM, Elena."

She patted the empty concrete beside her. He sat, not too close, not too far. The boundaries of friendship, redrawn by heartbreak.

"Still thinking about him?" Mark asked softly.

"Still thinking about how I believed him when he said I was the one. While he was—"

"Fucking someone else," Mark finished. "Bull, Elena. It was always bull."

She rested her head on his shoulder. A tremor of something—relief, exhaustion, the first crack in the dam she'd built around herself. The pool's surface rippled, distorting their reflections into something almost beautiful.

"The goldfish knew better than me," she murmured. "It stopped swimming after a week. Just gave up."

Mark's hand found hers in the dark. "You're not giving up. You're just learning to swim in deeper water."

She watched the moon pool on the water's surface, silver and impossible. Maybe it was time to stop floating. Maybe it was time to dive.