Signal Loss

The ocean floor was silent except for the relentless thrum of the cable ship's engines. Sarah had spent three weeks laying fiber optic cable across the Atlantic, and her body had adapted to the perpetual motion of the sea. The water below was three miles deep—a black void that made her feel insignificant and infinite all at once.

"You're going back to him, aren't you?"

The voice crackled through her headset. Mark, her colleague and the closest thing she had to a friend on this vessel. He knew about Julian, the architect she'd left behind in Lisbon because he couldn't handle her six-month rotations.

"I don't know what I'm going to do," she said, watching the cable spool out into the darkness. Each segment carried thousands of conversations, memories, declarations of love and hate. She was literally stitching the world together while her own connections frayed.

When they docked in the Azores, Mark invited her to play padel at the local club. She hadn't picked up a racquet in years, but the game was like riding a bike—except now her knees popped when she lunged for the ball, and she played with a quiet desperation that hadn't existed in her twenties.

"He's getting married," Mark said between points, the rubber ball cracking against the glass walls. "Julian. Saw it on Facebook."

Sarah missed her return. The ball rolled to a stop at her feet.

That night, she sat on the edge of the hotel bathtub, watching water swirl down the drain. She'd left everything for a man who'd moved on before she'd even cleared Portuguese customs. Her phone buzzed—an email from HR about her next assignment. Another cable. Another ocean. Another six months of living suspended between depths and darkness.

She realized then that some breaks couldn't be repaired. Some signals, once lost, never returned. And maybe that was okay. Maybe the point wasn't to stay connected, but to learn how to exist in the quiet spaces between transmissions.

The water grew cold around her fingers. She let it run, feeling nothing at all.