Seventh Inning Stretch

I hadn't felt like myself since the funeral—more like a **zombie** going through the motions, hollowed out by the kind of grief that makes you forget to eat, forget to sleep, forget you were ever anything else than this empty thing walking around in your old life.

My **hair** had started going gray at thirty anyway, but the last six months had accelerated the process until I stopped recognizing the woman in the mirror. Not that I was looking much. Sarah's corporate law firm didn't pay me to have feelings.

"You're going to that **baseball** game tonight," she'd told me yesterday, sliding the ticket across my desk like a court order. "Don't make me write you up for refusing team-building activities."

So here I sat in the company box, nursing room-temperature **water** while my coworkers got progressively louder on beer. Mark from accounting kept glancing at me—had been glancing at me since Monday, when he'd found me crying in the breakroom over a spilled **vitamin** supplement that had been in my purse since before.

"You want to talk about it?" he asked now, sliding into the seat beside me as the bottom of the seventh approached.

I laughed, harsh and rusty. "Not really."

"My wife died," he said, so casually I almost missed it. "Two years ago next month. I still take her vitamins every morning."

The stadium noise faded to a hum. I turned to really look at him for the first time—the lines around his eyes, the way his hands kept clenching around his plastic cup like he needed something to hold onto.

"How do you..." I swallowed. "How do you keep showing up?"

"I don't," he said. "Not really. But someone told me once that you have to keep moving or you'll never start again. So I move. Through the motions, through the games, through the days where everything reminds me and the days where nothing does."

The crowd roared as someone hit a home run. We didn't turn to watch.

"Your hair," he said softly. "It's beautiful. Silver at the temples like that."

My hand went to it self-consciously. "Thanks."

"You're not a zombie, you know. You're just... healing. Which is worse, sometimes."

I started crying—not the ugly breakdown from the breakroom, but something gentler. Something that felt like the first real breath I'd taken in six months.

"I'm Mark," he said, extending his hand.

"Elena."

"Elena," he repeated, like he was learning the shape of something precious. "Do you want to get out of here? There's this diner nearby that serves milkshakes so thick you need a spoon."

The baseball game continued behind us—another inning, another crowd, another perfectly ordinary evening that would become, for two people who'd forgotten how to be alive, the place where they started remembering again.