The Art of Floating

The cat has been staring at me for three days. Not the casual, grazing attention cats usually offer—this is something else. A judgment. My therapist would say I'm projecting, but Millie knows. She knows I've been moving through my life like a zombie, haunted by the ghost of a marriage that ended six months ago without anyone dying.

I drag myself to the pool at 5 AM, when the water is still and the lights are dim. Swimming is the only time my brain shuts up. There's something about being underwater, suspended in that blue silence, where the only imperative is forward motion. Stroke, breathe, stroke. The weightlessness feels like cheating—a temporary reprieve from gravity, from memory, from the way Maya's key still sits in the bowl by the door because I can't make myself touch it.

"You coming to padel tonight?" Jenna asks when she calls, and I almost say no. Almost continue my experiment in how long a person can exist in their apartment before becoming technically institutionalized.

But Jenna has been my friend since before the before times, and she has this way of extending invitations that sound casual but contain the weight of an intervention.

"Sure," I hear myself say. "Why not."

The court is bright, too bright. My racquet feels foreign in my hand, my muscles protesting movements they haven't performed in months. Jenna's partner canceled—something about a sick child—so it's just us, rallying back and forth in a rhythm that should be familiar but feels awkward, like speaking a language I've almost forgotten.

She doesn't ask about Maya. Doesn't ask about the apartment I haven't cleaned, the job I haven't quit, the cat who's started sleeping in Maya's old side of the bed. Instead she hits the ball hard enough that I have to run for it, forcing me into my body, into the present moment, into the sweat on my forehead and the thud of the ball against the glass walls.

Afterward, we sit on a bench and share a water bottle. The sun is setting, painting everything in that golden-hour light that makes the world look like it might be okay, eventually.

"You know," Jenna says, "zombie movies get it wrong. It's not that the undead want to eat brains. They just want to remember what it felt like to be alive."

I look at her, really look at her, and something in my chest cracks open. A little, but enough.

"Yeah," I say. "I think I'm ready to come back now."

Millie is waiting by the door when I get home. For the first time in months, I pick her up, bury my face in her fur, and let myself feel everything.