The Art of Floating

The pool was empty at 4 AM, which was exactly how Marcus preferred it. Forty-two years old, recently divorced, and feeling like a **zombie** moving through what remained of his life, he'd taken to **swimming** laps before dawn. The water swallowed his thoughts, or at least drowned them enough to bear.

He met Sarah at the **padel** court two weeks later. She was everything he wasn't: vibrant, sarcastic, radiating a kind of careless energy that made his chest ache. They played poorly, laughed too loudly, and ended up at her place by sunset. The sex was desperate, the kind that tries to fuck away grief.

"You're not over her," Sarah said afterward, cigarette smoke curling toward the ceiling.

"I'm not over anything."

The real collapse came three months later. Marcus lost his job—corporate restructuring, they called it. He sat on his back patio with a bottle of whiskey, watching a **fox** pick through the compost bin. The animal's eyes caught the light, amber and indifferent, before it slipped back into the darkness. Marcus felt an absurd kinship. Both of them scavenging in the wreckage.

He stopped swimming. Stopped everything, really.

Sarah found him on the floor of his living room three days later. She didn't ask why he hadn't called. She just pulled him up, made him shower, and drove him to her gym.

"You're going to paddle," she said, pushing him toward the **pool**.

"I can't."

"You don't have to swim. Just get in the water."

The shock of it knocked the air from his lungs. He sank, then surfaced, gasping. Sarah sat on the edge, legs dangling in, not touching him. Just present.

Marcus floated on his back, staring at the ceiling where water distorted everything. Maybe that was the point. Everything looked different when you were holding yourself up. Maybe that was enough for now.

"Still a zombie?" Sarah asked.

"Working on it," he said, and meant it.