The Absence We Swam In

The resort brochure promised renewal. What it delivered was an endless supply of organic **vitamin** packets in paper envelopes that dissolved on the tongue like sacraments. I took them dutifully, standing on the balcony of the bungalow we'd reserved six months ago, when Mark still believed in us enough to put down the deposit.

The infinity **pool** stretched toward the ocean, a seamless illusion of continuity. I watched couples glide through the turquoise water, their bodies reflecting in each other's orbits, and felt the particular loneliness of being exactly where you were supposed to be, but entirely alone. The woman in the cabana next to mine was here for her anniversary. She'd told me yesterday, beaming, while I nodded and swallowed the taste of papaya.

The fruit platter arrived each morning at seven. **Papaya** had been his favorite—soft, sweet, slightly musky. We'd eaten it together on our first real date, standing in his kitchen at 3 AM, juice dripping down our wrists, laughing about something I can't remember now. Now the papaya sat untouched on my plate, a small orange monument to everything I couldn't stomach.

At dinner, the waiter recommended the spinach salad, telling me it was harvested from the resort's own garden that morning. "Local **spinach** has more nutrients," he said, with the earnest conviction of someone who believes food can fix you. I nodded, thinking about how Mark had always ordered spinach when he was trying to be healthy, trying to be the man who deserved me, trying.

"The supplements help," the woman at the next table told me, leaning in with conspiratorial intimacy. "My husband says I'm a different person when I take them."

I looked at the **vitamin** packet on my nightstand back in the room. Mark had researched them obsessively, reading studies about folate and conception timing. We were going to start trying after this trip. That was the plan.

That night I slipped into the **pool** under a moon so bright it cast shadows. The water held me weightless, suspended between depths. I floated on my back and looked up at the stars, thinking about how we're mostly water anyway, how we're all just temporary arrangements of matter held together by the thinnest threads of wanting.

For a moment, I felt something like peace—not the resolution the brochure promised, but something quieter. The acceptance that some things don't get fixed, only carried. I kicked toward the surface and broke through into the air, gasping, alive, and entirely alone.