The Chlorine Decision

Forty-two and already dissolving. That's what Marco thought, staring at his reflection in the locker room mirror. His **hat**—a Mets cap he'd worn since college—sat askew on the bench, a relic of who he used to be.

The doctor had called yesterday. Not cancer, but close enough to make everything suddenly sharp. A deficiency, treatable with a simple **vitamin** regimen. Just swallow this, and maybe you'll stop feeling like your body is quietly abandoning you.

He stepped toward the pool. The **water** churned with the movements of strangers—each person fighting their own silent war against gravity, against time, against the creeping awareness of mortality.

Maria had left him three weeks ago. Not with a fight, but with the terrifying calm of someone who had simply stopped believing in the project of their marriage. She'd taken the good towels and the cat, left behind her houseplants and a note that said she was done **running** from the truth of their unhappiness.

He slipped into the pool. The shock of cold took his breath away. Marco began **swimming**, stroke after stroke, his body remembering the rhythm from summers he'd rather forget. Each lap was a negotiation with memory—his father's funeral by a lake, the way Maria had looked at him across the breakfast table for the last ten years, the way his mother had held his hand at the hospital.

A woman in the next lane watched him. Not with interest, but with the recognition of someone who knew exactly what it looked like when a man was trying to outpace his own shadow.

Marco surfaced, gasping. He thought about the vitamins in his locker. About the hat on the bench. About the empty apartment waiting.

He dove under again.

Some things, he decided, were better left underwater.