The Art of Drowning in Air

The email arrived at 2:47 AM, which was precisely the hour when I felt most like a zombie. Not the groaning, brain-eating kind, but the corporate sort: gray-faced, shuffling between zoom calls, my soul leaking out through pores clogged with fluorescent light and recycled air. I'd been at the firm for seven years, long enough that the junior associates looked at me with pity.

I was sitting on the balcony of our Miami apartment, the palm fronds casting knife-shadows across my laptop screen. Maya was asleep inside, possibly dreaming of a version of me who didn't check email at 2:47 AM. We'd stopped speaking in paragraphs months ago. Now we communicated in phrases, nouns, the occasional grunt timed around the commercial breaks of whatever she was watching on the bedroom television. The cable box glowed like a failed star, its little green eye watching us sleep.

We'd met swimming in the ocean during a hurricane party, which should have told me everything about our relationship. "We're crazy," she'd said, laughing as the waves slammed us against the sand. "We should get married."

We did. We also bought furniture we couldn't afford and stopped swimming anywhere but separately, in chlorinated pools at the gym.

Now she lay in our bed, which was really two mattresses pushed together because we couldn't agree on firmness. She'd started mentioning her mother's guest room in casual conversation, dropping it like a test balloon. I closed my laptop. The apartment was suddenly illuminated by a bolt of lightning, and for a moment, I saw everything clearly: the television she watched to avoid looking at me, the yoga mat gathering dust in the corner, my reflection in the glass—hollow-eyed, suit jacket half-on, palm pressed against the cold door.

I could go back inside. I could wake her and say something honest, something that might crack us open or break us completely. Instead, I stood there until the thunder rolled through, waiting for the next strike, calculating the distance between disaster and the moment you finally decide to move.