The Color of Drowning

She left him on a Tuesday, which felt like a cosmic joke—Tuesdays were for dentist appointments and performance reviews, not for your marriage to dissolve like sugar in warm water.

Six months later, Marcus had perfected the art of being a corporate zombie. He showed up, he nodded, he sent emails that began with "As per my last communication." His colleagues didn't notice the hollow man in the conference room, but his running shoes did.

Every morning at 5:00 AM, he was running, his trainers hitting the pavement in a rhythm that was the only real thing in his life. The physical pain was preferable to the other kind—the way his apartment still smelled like her vanilla shampoo, how the orange curtains she'd picked out mocked him daily.

"It's just a color," she'd said when he balked at the fabric swatch. "It's warm, Marcus. Don't you want our home to feel warm?"

Now the apartment felt suffocatingly hot, like drowning in orange-tinted water.

He stopped at the bridge on his route, chest heaving, sweat stinging his eyes. The water below churned, dark and inscrutable in the predawn gray. He thought about jumping—not to die, but to feel something that wasn't this endless limbo between the life he'd had and the life he couldn't seem to start.

A woman jogged past, her pace steady, her face composed. She didn't look like a zombie. She looked like someone who knew who she was when she woke up in the morning.

Marcus watched her disappear into the distance, then turned toward home. The orange curtains would still be there when he returned. The water would still be running when he showered. But maybe tomorrow, he wouldn't run from the emptiness. Maybe tomorrow, he'd finally call the therapist his sister kept recommending.

One step at a time. One foot in front of the other, like running, like moving forward, like learning—eventually—how to breathe again.