The Drowning Room

You know you've been working too many eighty-hour weeks when you start recognizing the other people on the 6:15 AM train. Not recognizing them like, oh hey, I've seen you before. Recognizing them like, there's the woman who smells like peppermint tea and regret, there's the man whose life has clearly been a series of disappointments since 2008. We're all just swimming upstream now, aren't we? Some metaphorical salmon that forgot why we started this journey in the first place.

"You look like hell," Maya said, sliding into the booth across from me. She was right, of course. My hair—once thick and brown and the kind of thing people complimented—had been thinning since the divorce. Now it was just another thing I didn't have the energy to fix. Another thing that had started looking like my father's.

"Rough quarter," I said. "The merger's turning everyone into zombies."

The joke landed wrong. Maya's face did that thing where she forgot to express any emotion at all for a second too long. I'd been making that joke for months, ever since Justin—her Justin, our Justin—died. Brain cancer at thirty-four. The kind of thing that happens to other people. The kind of thing that makes you understand why people believe in God, because randomness at that scale feels like cruelty, not statistics.

"I miss him too," I said, because I was tired of pretending we were both okay.

Maya ordered whiskey instead of wine. "I found his swimsuit yesterday. Packed in a box I couldn't open for six months."

We used to all go swimming together. Sunday mornings at the Y, then Justin's apartment building's pool when he could get us past the concierge. He'd do these elaborate dives that made no sense competitively but were deeply funny—like he was auditioning for a circus he'd never join. I thought about how we don't really lose people all at once. We lose them in pieces. The way they'd laugh at something specific. The hair left on a brush. The swimsuit folded in a box.

"I'm not swimming anymore," Maya said. "I tried last week and I just—I couldn't. It felt like moving through something that used to be familiar but now I couldn't remember how to do it."

I thought about telling her that's what grief feels like. That's what being thirty-eight feels like. That's what happens when you realize the life you thought you were building—the one with the career and the partner and the sense that everything was moving toward something—was actually just you swimming in circles while the water got colder.

Instead I said, "Let's not do that tonight. Let's just be zombies together."

She smiled. A real one, finally. "Best friend I've got."