The Chlorine and The Clock

I'd never seen an **orange** that color—not fruit, but the cheap plastic lounge chair beneath me, the same artificial hue as the sunset I pretended to admire. The resort **pool** stretched before me like a turquoise wound in the earth, filled with bodies glistening in ways that made me think less of vitality and more of preservation.

Marcus had left three hours ago. His text still sat on my phone: "This isn't working." Not us—this. The retreat, the couples therapy, the desperate attempt to inject new life into something that had been decomposing for years. The **vitamin** packets they'd given us at check-in sat untouched on the nightstand back in our room. Vitamin D for mood, B12 for energy, some proprietary blend for "reigniting passion." As if passion could be synthesized.

A woman in the adjacent chair cracked open a capsule of something green and potent-smelling. Wheatgrass. **Spinach** powder. The air already tasted like chlorinated desperation.

"How long have you been here?" she asked, not looking up from her magazine.

"Three days," I said. "You?"

"Weeks." She laughed, and it sounded like breaking glass. "My therapist said I needed to rediscover myself. Turns out, myself likes cheap cocktails and judging other people's failing marriages."

I looked at the water again. In the deep end, a man floated on his back, eyes closed, completely still. For a terrible moment, I thought—

"He does that," she said, following my gaze. "Three hours every afternoon. Says it's the only time he feels weightless."

The sun sank lower, casting everything in that impossible orange light. I thought about Marcus, about the vitamins we were supposed to take together, about the conversation we'd never had because we were too busy having conversations about having conversations.

"What do you actually want?" she asked suddenly.

The question surprised me. Not from Marcus, not from myself, but from a stranger in a plastic orange chair.

"To stop," I said. "To just... stop pretending."

She nodded, as if this was the most honest thing she'd heard in weeks.

In the distance, the man in the pool began to tread water, slowly, deliberately. Something about the motion was hypnotic—effortful, purposeless, and utterly human.

"I think," she said, "that might be the only thing worth learning here."

I watched the water smooth itself over again, knowing I would pack my bags tomorrow, alone, and that the drive home would be the first real thing I'd done in years.