The Art of Treading Water

The hospital cafeteria orange was fluorescent, almost aggressive in its synthetic brightness. Elena sat across from me, picking at the fruit segments with a plastic fork, her wedding ring clicking against the tray. We hadn't spoken since the funeral—her husband's, who had also been my friend, though neither of us could say what kind anymore without bruising the silence between us.

"You're still swimming?" she asked, and I couldn't tell if she meant the laps I'd taken every morning for fifteen years, or the way I'd moved through the years since David died, suspended somewhere between drowning and staying afloat.

"Still swimming," I said.

She nodded, took a bite of spinach that looked tired and wilted, much like both of us felt. David would have made a joke about it. He'd had this way of turning ordinary moments into something that made you laugh until your ribs ached. That was the problem with loving someone who was also your friend's husband—you got the better part of the bargain, but you also had to watch someone else navigate the wreckage of what you'd both built.

"I started swimming too," Elena said softly. "Every morning at six. The water feels like... like the only place where gravity doesn't expect anything from me."

I looked at her—really looked at her—for the first time in three years. Her eyes were the same color as the orange she was dismantling, bright and hurting. We were both swimming, I realized. Both of us had been swimming through different oceans of the same loss, and neither of us had bothered to reach out and say, this is hard, this is so fucking hard.

"Tomorrow," I said, and my voice sounded rusty. "Six o'clock. We can swim together."

She smiled, something small and real breaking through her careful expression. "I'd like that."

Outside, the October light was turning orange against the skyline, beautiful and fleeting and almost painful to witness. Some things, I thought, you just have to learn to swim through together.