Sunday Morning Physics

The divorce papers sat on the kitchen counter like a small animal I'd refused to feed. Six weeks since Elena left, and I was still sleeping on the couch because the bed felt too large, too hollow, like a ship I didn't know how to sail.

I'd taken up padel at her brother's club—something about needing a hobby, needing to not sit in this apartment surrounded by all the furniture we'd chosen together. The sport was ridiculous: tennis in a box, played by men in their forties pretending they were still athletes. But it got me out of the house.

Sunday morning, 7 AM. I stood on the court as Marcus served. The bear of a man—he was built like a freight train, all bulk and sudden grace—grinned across the net.

'You look like shit,' he said. 'Hit it back.'

I swung, missed. The ball ricocheted off the glass wall.

'Your head's not in it,' Marcus said, retrieving the ball. 'You still sleeping on the couch?'

'Who told you that?'

'Elena.' He tossed me the ball. 'She worries about you.'

That was Elena. Still caring, still present, still gone. The cable bill was in both our names—I'd meant to change it, but there was something about that monthly reminder, that automatic payment, that felt like proof we'd existed.

We played another point. I actually returned it this time, a sharp angle that died in the corner.

'Good,' Marcus nodded. 'Now hit it like you mean it.'

We walked to the clubhouse afterward, and he showed me a photo on his phone: his daughter's graduation, Elena standing beside her in that sundress she'd bought for our anniversary three years ago. Her palm rested gently on the girl's shoulder—that tender gesture she used to give me when I couldn't sleep, when work hollowed me out, when my mother died and I didn't cry for a month.

'She looks good,' I said, and the words felt like stones.

'She asked about you,' Marcus said. 'Asked if you're still not eating.'

I drove home afterward. The apartment was quiet except for the cat, Elias, who Elena had taken but left with me because he hated change, because he'd attached himself to me in that stubborn way cats have, as if my melancholy were preferable to her new apartment's uncertain territory.

Elias wound around my legs as I stood in the living room. The couch, the TV with its cable connection I'd kept alive like a lifeline, the walls we'd painted together—it was all museum pieces now. Artifacts of a life I didn't know how to leave behind.

'Hey buddy,' I said, and picked him up. His purr vibrated against my chest, warm and alive and insistently present.

I set him down and went to the bedroom for the first time in six weeks. The bed was made, Elena's side untouched. I lay down, and the space didn't feel hollow anymore. It felt like space. Like room.

The phone buzzed: Marcus. 'Elena says to come to dinner Friday.'

I typed back: 'Tell her I'll be there.'

Then I turned over, and for the first time in weeks, I didn't immediately calculate how many hours until I could reasonably get up again.