The Drowning Room

Emma sat at her desk at 7:45 PM, the office silent except for the hum of fluorescent lights. She felt like a **zombie** going through the motions—emails, spreadsheets, the endless performance metrics. Marcus had texted three hours ago: *Dinner at 8?* She hadn't replied.

The **bull**shit in this place was suffocating. Her boss, David, had spent forty minutes in a meeting explaining why her team needed to be more agile, more lean, more whatever buzzword he'd learned in his latest leadership seminar. Emma had nodded, swallowed the **vitamin** D supplement she kept in her desk—doctor's orders, she wasn't getting enough sunlight—and dreamed of the swimming pool she hadn't visited in six months.

She grabbed dinner from the bodega: salad with **spinach**, container wilting in the heat. That was her life now. Wilting.

Her phone buzzed again. Marcus. *Still on?*

Emma typed: *Can't. Working late.*

*Again?*

*Yes.*

She remembered how they'd met at the community center pool. He was the lifeguard who'd fished her out at 5 AM when she'd shown up, hungover and desperate to rinse away the mistakes of the night before. *You're drowning, he'd told her, and she'd laughed because it was the most honest thing anyone had said in years.

Now she was drowning again, but on dry land, in a cubicle that smelled like stale coffee and quiet desperation.

The spinach tasted like regret. The vitamin D pill sat heavy in her stomach. She was twenty-eight years old and already becoming the kind of person who bought matching luggage sets and called it excitement.

Emma stood up. She grabbed her bag, turned off her computer. David's agile transformation could wait.

The pool closed at ten. She had forty-five minutes to remember what it felt like to move through something that didn't ask anything of her. Forty-five minutes to float, to breathe, to stop being a goddamn zombie.

Marcus picked up on the first ring.

*Can you meet me at the pool?*