The Art of Losing

At forty-two, Elena found herself running from nothing and everything at once. The predawn streets of Chicago were her sanctuary, each footfall a metronome counting down the seconds since Marcus left. He'd taken the furniture, the good wine glasses, and their shared dreams of opening that café they used to talk about in bed. What he hadn't taken was Barnaby, their aging orange tabby who now stared at her with what looked distinctly like judgment from his perch on the kitchen island.

"You're lucky," she told the cat, pouring coffee with hands that still trembled sometimes when she thought about how easily five years could dissolve into paperwork and forwarded mail. "You don't have to explain to your mother why you're still single at Thanksgiving."

Her sister had suggested she try padel, insisting it was the new pickleball, the yoga of racquet sports. So there Elena was, Saturday mornings at the club, smashing a ball against a wall while women younger than her divorce discussed fertility treatments and Botox. The sport was ridiculous—part tennis, part squash, entirely absurd—but there was something satisfying about the violence of it, the clean crack of the ball, the sweat that felt earned rather than anxious.

Afterward, she'd return to her apartment and feed Barnaby, then sit watching the goldfish bowl in the bedroom. It was Marcus's hobby originally, an obsession with creating the perfect aquatic ecosystem. Now she maintained it alone, watching the golden scales flash in the tank light, mesmerizing and meaningless. The fish lived in their silent world, swimming in circles, and sometimes she wondered if they were happier than she was, or if they were simply too stupid to know the difference.

The baseball card collection was still in the closet. Marcus had left it, said it reminded him too much of his father, the man who'd taught him to keep score and measure worth in statistics. Elena had never understood baseball—the way it could stretch on for hours, the sudden explosions of violence in a game that was mostly standing around—until now. Alone in the apartment, she sometimes took out the cards, touching the corners, wondering what it meant to collect something, to hold onto pieces of the past.

Barnaby jumped onto her lap, purring with maddening contentment. Outside, the city was waking up, another day of people running toward things, away from things, trying desperately to convince themselves they were moving forward. Elena scratched the cat behind his ears and thought about her padel lesson tomorrow, about the fish that needed feeding, about the strange unfinished business of living.