Swimming Through Screens

The pool was empty at 6 AM — the only time Maya could swim without hearing the well-meaning questions about how she's holding up. She dove in, the cool water shocking her skin, and began her laps. This was the only place her mind went quiet. No memories of David's laugh, no replaying the last argument, no wondering if she'd made a terrible mistake.

Just the rhythmic pull through water, the controlled breathing, the blue tiles blurring beneath her. She was swimming away from herself, and for forty-five minutes every morning, it actually worked.

Back in her apartment, her iphone sat on the nightstand like a dormant animal. She hadn't opened his text thread in three weeks — the one where he'd finally said he couldn't do this anymore, that he needed space, that whatever they'd been trying to fix was too broken. Sometimes her thumb hovered over his name. Sometimes she almost called. Then she'd remember the way he'd looked at her that last night, like she was a problem he couldn't solve anymore.

Her goldfish — a rescue from a roommate who'd moved out — swam endless circles in its bowl on the kitchen counter. Maya found herself talking to it sometimes. "They say you have a seven-second memory," she'd whisper, dropping flakes onto the water's surface. "Must be nice. To just keep swimming around the same castle, forgetting you've already seen it a thousand times. To not recognize patterns. To not remember what hurt you."

The goldfish would surface, mouth opening and closing, then dive again, seemingly content in its tiny world.

This morning, something shifted. Maya towel-dried her hair and picked up her phone. The screen lit up with notifications: work emails, calendar reminders, a coupon for a pizza place she and David used to order from. And there, buried beneath the trivial — a text from his sister. Haven't heard from you. Just checking in.

She stared at the message. Part of her wanted to type everything: how she'd started swimming because she needed to exhaust herself enough to sleep. How she'd kept his goldfish because it was the only living thing that didn't expect anything from her. How some days she missed him so badly it felt like a physical weight in her chest.

Instead, she typed: I'm okay. Hope you are too.

Then she did something she'd been avoiding for weeks. She opened David's message thread. His last text still sat there, followed by weeks of her own unanswered thoughts — drafts she'd never sent, questions she'd never asked, I love yous and I hate yous and come homes. All the messiness she'd carried in silence.

Maya selected the entire conversation and deleted it.

The goldfish swam to the front of its bowl, watching her. Its mouth opened, closed. Opened, closed.

"You know what?" Maya said softly. "Maybe we're both just swimming in circles. Maybe that's not so bad."

She dropped some food into the water. The goldfish surfaced, ate, and swam on — neither remembering nor forgetting, just existing in the space it was given. Maya picked up her towel, already thinking about tomorrow's laps, the way the water would hold her weight, the way she could finally just breathe.