Salt Water & Orange Peels

The padel court echoed with rhythmic thwacking—ball against paddle, paddle against ball. Elena sat on the bench outside, nursing a gin and tonic she didn't want, watching Marc play with his new girlfriend. The woman was twenty-six, vibrant, everything Elena hadn't been in years.

"You're not even swimming," her sister Sarah had said that morning at breakfast. "You came to this resort and you're just... sitting."

Elena had peeled an orange then, tearing into the skin with aggressive, precise motions, letting the citrus spray mist the air between them. "I'm bearing witness," she'd replied. "There's a difference."

Now she watched Marc laugh at something the girl said—shaking his hair, his shoulders loose in a way they hadn't been around Elena in two years. The bear of a man he'd become during the pandemic: soft, hibernating, growing distant in their shared bed while she worked two jobs and he collected unemployment and took up padel.

She stood up, leaving her drink behind. The pool beckoned—blue and chlorinated and pretending to be an ocean. Elena stripped down to her suit, the one Marc had bought her two anniversaries ago, and slipped into the water. The shock of cold was sharp, immediate.

She began swimming laps, counting strokes: one, two, breathe. One, two, breathe. Her body remembered what her mind wanted to forget—how to move through something that wanted to push you down, how to find purchase in resistance. The orange sun was setting when she finally stopped, clinging to the edge of the pool, breathless and renewed.

Marc and the girl were gone from the padel court. Elena pulled herself from the water, dripping and tired, and walked back to her room alone. For the first time in months, she didn't feel like she was waiting for something to happen. She was happening, finally, to herself.