Screen Burn at Dawn

Mark hit the pavement at 5:03 AM, his breath fogging in the predawn chill. Running wasn't exercise anymore; it was fleeing. From the condo where Elena slept—or pretended to. From the emails that already piling up at work. From the mirror, where he'd stopped recognizing the man staring back.

His iPhone buzzed against his hip, a phantom limb he couldn't amputate. Once, this device had connected them. Late-night calls when Elena was in grad school. Photos of their first apartment, terrible furniture and impossible hope. Now it was just another repository for ghosts: unanswered texts, voicemails he saved but couldn't delete, three years of shared silence compressed into binary.

He'd become what his therapist called a "corporate zombie"—walking through meetings, nodding at presentations, signing documents while his mind drifted elsewhere. Yesterday, he'd approved a budget extension without reading it. Someone had laughed and said, "That's the Mark we remember." He'd smiled, teeth bared, nothing behind it.

The route took him along the waterfront, where the bay lapped against pilings dark as old bruises. He slowed as the first real light of morning caught the water, turning it silver and bruise-purple. This was supposed to be his meditation time, his moment of clarity. Instead, he found himself standing still, phone in hand, scrolling through photos of Elena from before the dead time set in. Her with actual joy in her eyes. Her holding his hand at some gallery opening, names forgotten.

A memory surfaced: their honeymoon, floating in the Mediterranean at sunset, salt on their skin, the promise of everything they'd build. Now the salt felt like something else—the preservative that kept them both fresh enough to function, neither willing to be the first to say the rot had won.

He'd been running for months. This morning, finally, he stopped.

The phone vibrated—Elena, awake early. Mark stared at her name on the screen, then at the water, then at the man in his reflection: tired eyes, a body that moved through days it didn't inhabit. He wasn't a zombie yet. But he was running out of time to choose something else.

The bay kept lapping against the pilings. Mark pressed delete on the old voicemails, one by one, and started walking home.