The Bear Market of Us

Running had become Elena's religion. Five miles every morning before dawn, the rhythmic slap of her Nikes against pavement the only prayer she offered anymore. While David slept, curled around the empty space she'd vacated, she was already three miles into negotiating with herself about the mortgage, David's increasingly desperate stock picks, the way love curdles into something unrecognizable somewhere between the fifth and seventh year.

Tonight, at dinner, David was bullish on a new cryptocurrency scheme. His eyes had that feverish gleam they got when he was about to lose money they didn't have.

"It's different this time, El. The market's finally turning."

Elena watched him chew, a piece of spinach stubbornly clinging to his incisor like a tiny green flag of surrender. She thought about mentioning it—she would have, three years ago, when intimacy meant having permission to point out each other's flaws. Now she just watched it bob with each enthusiastic word about diversification and compound interest and the retirement they'd stopped talking about in anything but the abstract.

The spinach, she realized, was the most honest thing between them.

"The running," he said, suddenly switching gears, "I looked it up. Overexertion can lower libido. Is that what's going on?"

She'd been running longer than they'd been together, and he knew it. But David had always preferred asking diagnostic questions to accepting explanations that required him to change. He was like that with everything—relationships, money, happiness—treating them like markets that would inevitably turn bullish if he just waited long enough, refused to accept the loss, doubled down on the same failing strategy.

Elena reached across the table and gently flicked the spinach from his tooth.

He went still. The bull market euphoria evaporated from his face.

"Oh," he said. "How long?"

She picked up her plate. "I'm going for a run."

"Elena—"

"It's different this time, David."

She was already lacing her shoes when he came to the door, standing in the frame he'd once carried her through on their wedding day. They were both running now—her toward something unknown, him from something he'd refused to see coming until it was already too late.

Some markets never recover. Some losses are permanent.

She stepped into the predawn darkness and didn't look back.