The Art of Drowning Slowly

The running shoes sat in the corner, still caked with mud from the marathon she'd quit at mile twenty-two. That was three months ago, around the time Elena stopped calling. Now the shoes collected dust like unfinished sentences.

Marcus stood at the kitchen sink, watching the water stream over plates that had been sitting there for two days. The pipes groaned — the building was old, like him, like everything else that had settled into comfortable decay.

A friend once told him that depression was just your body's way of saying you needed to slow down. Marcus had punched that friend. Not hard. Just enough to make a point about how some advice doesn't translate across tax brackets.

The cat —Barnaby, inherited along with the apartment when his sister moved to Portland — jumped onto the counter and knocked an orange onto the floor. It rolled under the refrigerator, joining a colony of dust bunnies and possibly several other pieces of fruit. Barnaby stared at Marcus with those judging yellow eyes.

"You're the worst roommate I've ever had," Marcus told the cat.

Barnaby blinked slowly.

His phone buzzed. Elena. For a second, Marcus considered letting it ring. She'd want to talk about her wedding. The invitations had gone out last week — cream cardstock with gold leaf, the kind of expensive that whispered we made better choices than you. He'd RSVP'd yes because that's what you did when someone you'd loved for seven years married someone named Tyler who worked in private equity and had a jawline that could cut glass.

Marcus grabbed the phone. "Hey."

"I'm pregnant," she said instead of hello.

The water kept running. Marcus watched it swirl down the drain, thinking about how he used to run six miles a day and now he couldn't even run away from this conversation. "Congratulations."

"I don't know if I'm keeping it."

The silence stretched between them like a wire about to snap. Somewhere in the apartment, Barnaby yowled.

"Tyler wants to wait," she continued. "He says we need to think about careers and timing and markets." Her voice cracked. "He has a spreadsheet."

Marcus turned off the water. The sudden quiet was worse. "What do you want?"

"I don't know. I called you because..." She stopped. "Because you're the only person who knows me without the spreadsheet."

He looked at the running shoes in the corner. He could put them on. He could go outside and run until his lungs burned, until the world narrowed to the rhythm of his own breath, until he was someone who made decisions instead of watching other people make them.

"I'm coming over," Marcus said.

"It's midnight."

"I'll bring oranges. And wine. We can make terrible choices together."

Elena laughed, and it sounded like something breaking and healing at the same time. Barnaby rubbed against Marcus's leg, purring like a small engine of forgiveness.

Marcus grabbed his keys. The shoes could wait another day.