The Art of Floating

The dog's leash burned against my palm, a living tether to the life I'd just abandoned. Barnaby—a golden retriever with none of his breed's characteristic cheer—panted beside me on the hotel room bed. He was hers, technically. She'd left him with me during the divorce mediation, some final cruelty disguised as practicality. "You're better at this," she'd said, with that small, devastating smile. "The single life suits you."

I rose and crossed to the mirror. My hair, once meticulously styled, now stuck up in seven different directions. I'd stopped coloring the gray at the temples two months ago—another casualty of the slow-motion demolition of our marriage.

Down at the pool, the air smelled of chlorine and expensive sunscreen. I stripped to my boxers, ignoring the families gathered at the shallow end. Their laughter cut through me like glass.

I lowered myself into the water. It was cold, shocking my skin into gooseflesh. I began swimming laps, turning always at the same wall, back and forth in a rectangle of chlorinated blue. My body remembered the rhythm from college, before her, before the mortgage, before I'd learned to measure time in quarterly goals rather than breaths.

At the pool's edge, a television mounted under a palm frond canopy blared a baseball game. The Giants were down by three in the eighth. I'd watched them win the pennant the night she'd first said she loved me, both of us drunk on Two-Buck Chuck and possibility. Now, through the water-warped surface, the players moved like ghosts through gray static.

I stopped swimming and treaded water, watching my legs float upward in eerie slow motion. For a moment, I let go of the bottom. My body bobbed, suspended between surface and depth, between the man I'd been and whatever came next.

Barnaby whined from the pool chairs. I pulled myself toward the ladder, water sheeting off my skin, realizing I'd left the leash upstairs. The dog pressed his wet nose against my hand, and for the first time in months, something in my chest began to loosen.

We'd both been left behind. But we were still here, treading water, learning to float in the space between what was lost and what remained.