The Art of Drowning Slowly

The dog died on a Tuesday, which felt like a cosmic joke—Tuesdays were for mundane disappointments, not existential ones. But there lay Buster, golden retriever mix who'd outlived two marriages and one career, breathing his last while I knelt on the kitchen floor that still smelled faintly of whatever I'd burned for dinner three nights ago.

After the vet left, I found myself at the sink, running water over my hands because I couldn't decide what to do next. The water kept coming—cold, indifferent, unlimited—and I watched it spiral down the drain, thinking how easy it would be to follow.

My phone buzzed. Sarah, reminding me about the vitamin regimen she'd started me on after the divorce. 'Take your D3,' she'd said, 'you're depressed because you're literally deficient.' So I swallowed the little capsules with tap water, standing alone in a house that felt too big for one person and too small for my grief.

I started running at dawn because sleep had become a negotiation I kept losing. The neighborhood woke up around me—sprinklers hissing, newspapers landing on driveways, other people with their other dogs. I ran past the park where Buster had chased tennis balls, past the coffee shop where Sarah had told me she wanted 'something real,' whatever that meant.

Three weeks in, I saw her. Sarah. Running in the opposite direction with someone new—some guy who probably took his vitamins on schedule and didn't have dead pets or existential dread at 5 AM. She waved. I kept running.

Now I run every morning, sometimes six miles, sometimes twelve. My knees click. My chest heaves. The dog is gone. The marriage is over. But for forty minutes, everything reduces to breath and pavement and the strange privilege of a body that still moves, still wants, still hasn't figured out how to be okay with any of this.

The water bill arrived yesterday. I paid it online while drinking a glass of water and swallowing my vitamins. Some mornings, I think I see Buster in the distance ahead of me, waiting. Some mornings, I almost catch up to him.