The Drowning Room

Three months after the funeral, I found myself standing in the supplement aisle at Whole Foods, staring at rows of vitamin D3 bottles like they might hold the answer to why my mother had wasted away in our guest bedroom, terrified of everything that wasn't prescribed by Dr. Sarah or featured on Oprah. I was thirty-four, running between hospice appointments and mortgage payments, my body reduced to a delivery system for cortisol and cheap pinot noir.

The pool was my one honest thing. I went every morning at 5 AM, when the water was still and the fluorescent lights hummed like something alive. Swimming laps was the only time I could hear myself think — or more precisely, the only time I didn't have to. The water held me. The water didn't ask why I wasn't married yet, or why I stayed in a marketing job that made me feel like a fraud, or why I kept checking my phone for texts from a married man who made me feel chosen and worthless in equal measure.

Barnaby was my mother's cat, a seventeen-pound orange beast who now lived with me and treated my apartment like conquered territory. He hated being alone. At night he slept on my chest, purring like a diesel engine, his weight a comfort and a suffocation both. Sometimes I woke up unable to breathe, his fur in my mouth, thinking: this is it, this is how it ends — crushed by love, or its approximation.

I started running after the pool, early mornings through the quiet suburbs, past houses that looked like my mother's, past the elementary school where I'd learned to tie my shoes and that boys would hit you when they liked you. My knees ached. I fantasized about just — not stopping. Running past the town line, past the state line, becoming someone whose phone didn't hold three years of unread texts from her dead mother.

The vitamins were for me now. I stood in the aisle, reading labels about immune support and bone health, thinking about how my mother had swallowed every promise they sold her until none of it mattered. My phone buzzed in my pocket — Him. I put the bottle back on the shelf. I bought cat food instead. Later, Barnaby would sleep on my chest while I watched the sunlight move across the floor, and for another day, I would stay exactly where I was, swimming through it, running nowhere, alive enough to keep going.