The Cable Between Us

The spinach was stuck between my teeth when David told me he was leaving. Forty-two years old, and I'd be smiling like an idiot with green debris in my mouth at the most consequential moment of my marriage. We were at that bistro downtown — the one with the terrible acoustics where everyone pretends they're somewhere more important than they are.

I'd ordered the spinach salad because the doctor said my cholesterol was creeping up. Another betrayal of the body, another small death. David watched me chew, something like pity in his eyes, and that's when he dropped it: not an affair, not a crisis, just — I don't think I love you anymore. Not for a while now.

The bull came later.

His name was Marcus from accounting, a man so notoriously bull-headed that upper management kept him around purely for his capacity to charge through problems. I ran into him at the office the next day, mascara still smudged from crying in the car, and he looked at me with something dangerously like recognition. 'He left you, didn't he?' Marcus said. 'I can tell. You've got that look.'

Then he told me his wife had left him three years ago, and we were standing there by the cable management box in the server room, surrounded by the humming infrastructure that kept the company running, and I thought — this is it, this is the moment I become the person who has an affair with a bull of a man from accounting. I didn't, of course. But I wanted to. For exactly twenty seconds, I wanted something messy and loud and unwise.

The cable guy came the following Tuesday. I'd been existing on takeout and wine and the peculiar clarity that comes from having your life dismantled. He was young, maybe twenty-five, with a name tag that said JAVIER and an easy smile that made my chest ache. 'Cable's been out since the storm,' he said, and I realized I hadn't noticed. Three days without television or internet, and I hadn't noticed. I'd been sitting in the silence of my half-empty apartment, thinking about David and spinach and the curious way your life can feel like both too much and not enough.

'You running a marathon?' he asked, nodding at my running shoes by the door. I'd bought them six months ago when I decided to get in shape, decided to become someone who ran.

'I haven't used them yet,' I said.

He finished the job and left, and I laced up the shoes and went outside. It was raining, a proper spring storm, and I started running. Not jogging — running. Like something was chasing me. Like something was waiting ahead. My lungs burned, my thighs screamed, and somewhere around mile three, I realized I was crying, or maybe it was just the rain.

I ran until I couldn't, until the world narrowed to the rhythm of my breath and the slap of rubber on wet pavement. David was gone. Marcus was back in accounting, being bull-headed about spreadsheets. Javier was probably fixing someone else's cable. The spinach was long digested. And there I was, running in the rain, absolutely and terrifyingly alive.