The Art of Drowning on Land

Elena had been running from the truth for three years, and her knees were starting to give out. Not literally—she ran every morning, 5K along the river, her breath syncing with the rhythm of her escape. But the running was physical, a way to exhaust herself enough that she didn't have to think about Richard, or the way he'd looked when he said he'd met someone else.

The divorce was final now. She'd signed the papers yesterday with hands that didn't shake, not even once. Richard had gotten the house in the suburbs. She'd kept the condo downtown, the one with the granite countertops she'd never used and the water view she'd never appreciated.

Tonight, for the first time in eleven years, she was cooking for one.

Elena stared at the spinach in her colander. Richard had hated spinach. Said it tasted like dirt. She'd stopped buying it, along with all the other foods he couldn't stand, until she'd forgotten what she actually liked. Now she had an entire bag of organic baby spinach, and no idea what to do with it.

She dropped some into a pan with olive oil. The leaves shrank so quickly—like her mother, wasting away in that hospital bed last spring, like her own ambitions somewhere along the way. The sizzle sounded like all the arguments she'd never had, all the times she'd swallowed her words instead of speaking them.

Elena opened a bottle of wine. Then another. The spinach burned while she was busy not crying over her mother's death, which she still hadn't properly mourned because she'd been too busy getting divorced.

"Fuck it," she said to her empty kitchen with its perfect view of the water.

She scraped the burnt spinach into the trash and stood at the floor-to-ceiling window. The river below was dark, endless, and for the first time, she understood the urge to just—step away. Not to die, exactly. But to stop running.

Her phone buzzed. Richard. "Did you want the wedding album?"

Elena watched the water flowing beneath her building, moving relentlessly forward, and suddenly she was running again—not away, but toward something she couldn't name yet. Toward a life where she ate what she wanted, where she cooked badly and laughed about it, where she drowned on land but learned to swim in her own emotions.

"Burn it," she texted back. "I don't want it."

Then she ordered a pizza with extra spinach, because she was forty-two years old and it was time to remember what hunger actually felt like.