Salt Water and Second Chances

The coconut **palm** outside our hotel room had stopped swaying hours ago, but sleep wouldn't come. Inside, a muted baseball game flickered across the screen—a reminder of the summers we'd spent at his parents' lake house, drinking cheap beer and pretending we weren't already drifting apart.

The **cable** connection had been glitching all weekend, just like our marriage. Marriage counseling had been his idea. The divorce mediation had been mine.

I slipped out to the pool at 3 AM, the **swimming** necessary—a baptism I needed to perform alone. The water was cold enough to make me gasp, perfect and sharp. I floated on my back, staring at a sky so different from the one above our apartment in Chicago, and finally let myself feel the relief I'd been suppressing for months.

We'd met playing softball in the city league. He'd been the charming shortstop with the crooked grin and the terrible batting average. I'd been the outfielder who couldn't catch but could laugh at herself. We'd been **running** on momentum and good times ever since, until momentum wasn't enough.

The pool lights cast rippling shadows on the bottom—skeletons of old movements. I thought about the **baseball** trophy gathering dust on our—my—bookshelf. How little it meant now. How little any of our accumulated life meant once you started dividing it into his and hers and ours and then just mine.

My wedding band felt heavy on my finger. I took it off and set it on the pool's edge, where it caught moonlight like a tiny, abandoned moon itself.

In the morning, I'd sign the papers. Tonight, I was just a woman learning to float in deep water again.