The Dead Don't Play Padel

The hat—a faded Padres baseball cap—sat on the bench next to my towel. I was twenty minutes into my morning swim when I saw him. Marcus. Standing at the edge of the pool, wearing swim trunks and that expression he'd given me the night he packed his things.

'I didn't know you were a member here,' he said, as if we hadn't shared a bed for three years. As if he didn't know my schedule better than his own.

I pulled myself from the water, water streaming from my hair. 'Since January. When I needed something to do with all that free time we both know I suddenly had.'

He winced. Good.

'I'm playing padel with some colleagues,' he said. 'We're short a player. Their partner cancelled.'

'And you thought of me.'

'Thought you might still have that competitive streak.' That smile—the one that used to make me forgive him for everything.

I'd been swimming every morning since he left. Lap after lap, counting strokes like I'd counted his excuses. Going through the motions, a zombie in a swimsuit, eating breakfast and showing up at work and responding to emails and laughing at appropriate moments during meetings. Dead inside but functioning.

'Fine,' I heard myself say. 'But I'm not joining your doubles league. Just this once.'

We played. My body remembered the angles, the footwork, the satisfying thwack of the ball against the racket. For forty minutes, I wasn't grieving. I wasn't hollow. I was just playing.

Afterwards, over drinks he didn't order, he said: 'You seem different. Lighter, somehow.'

I adjusted my baseball cap, the brim shielding my eyes from the harsh sun. 'I've been swimming,' I said. 'You find things in the water. Things you lost.'

He nodded slowly, like he understood. He never did.

I left him there with his colleagues and their polite workplace conversation. Tomorrow, I'd swim again. Not to forget, but to remember the person I was before I became someone who needed Marcus to feel complete. The person who could stand at the edge of something new and simply dive in.