The Chemistry of Grief

The bottle of vitamin D sat on my nightstand, a daily reminder of Dr. Evans' orders after the cancer scare. 'You need sunlight, or at least what passes for it in a capsule,' she'd said, not looking up from her chart. I took it with my coffee, standing barefoot in the kitchen while my ex-husband's dog—a retriever mix named Buster he'd left behind along with his half of the mortgage—stared at me with accusatory eyes.

I'd been walking through life like a zombie since Marcus moved out six months ago. The automatic pilot of existence: shower, work, sleep, repeat. My coworkers at the firm had stopped asking how I was doing somewhere around month three. Now they just nodded sympathetically when I entered meetings, like I was a ghost haunting my own career.

Tonight was different. Tonight, I'd decided, I would break the pattern.

The community pool closed at nine, but I knew the code—the same one we'd used when we were married, when Marcus and I would come here on summer evenings, swimming laps side by side in companionable silence. The water would be cold, shocking me awake.

As I slipped through the chain-link fence, my phone buzzed. A text from Ryan, the new associate in M&A—the one who'd been giving me those long, considering looks across the conference table. 'Drinks at O'Malley's?'

The bar was three blocks away. I could almost hear the baseball game playing on their televisions, the crowd roaring every time someone hit a homerun. That was Marcus's thing—baseball statistics and fantasy leagues and weekend games he'd dragged me to, sitting in the bleachers while I pretended to care about ERA and RBIs.

I stared at the pool, its surface dark and undisturbed. The vitamin D capsule sat heavy in my stomach. Buster whined at the back door, probably needing to go out.

I typed back: 'Give me 20 minutes.'

Then I stripped to my underwear and dove into the water.

The cold hit me like a revelation. I surfaced, gasping, and began to swim—first one lap, then another, until my muscles burned and my mind cleared of everything but the rhythm of stroke and breath. By the time I pulled myself from the pool, I was shivering but alive, really alive, for the first time in half a year.

The phone buzzed again. 'Perfect. See you soon.'

I toweled off and smiled. Some things, I realized, were worth leaving behind. Others were just beginning.