The Electric Summer We Drowned

The cat sat on the windowsill, watching rain blur the city into watercolor grief. Sarah had left him three weeks ago, taking everything except this orange tabby they'd found behind a baseball stadium during their first summer together. That night, drunk on cheap beer and new love, he'd named the cat Rookie.

Now the apartment echoed with memories. He'd spent last night watching old game footage, baseball players sliding through dirt, the crack of bats like bones breaking. Sarah used to laugh at his obsession with the sport, saying it was just men in pajamas hitting things with sticks. But she'd sit beside him anyway, her hand finding his in the dark.

The storm outside intensified. Lightning fractured the sky, and for a moment, the apartment flooded with that stark, clinical brightness that reveals everything you've been trying not to see. Dust on surfaces she used to clean. The way he'd stopped cooking real meals. How they'd both been quietly drowning for years.

He moved to the kitchen, his feet remembering where to step even as his mind wanted to forget. The sink was dripping — water falling like seconds, each one counting down something he couldn't name. He thought about that night at the baseball game, how she'd kissed him when their team lost, tasting like popcorn and rain. How she'd said, "This. This is what happiness feels like."

Rookie meowed, jumping down and winding through his legs. The cat was the only living thing that still touched him.

Another flash of lightning, closer this time. The thunder shook something loose in his chest. He realized with sudden, brutal clarity that Sarah hadn't just left him — she'd escaped. They'd been two people learning to hold their breath underwater, pretending they could live that way forever.

He turned off the television. The silence roared like the storm outside. In the morning, he'd call his sister. He'd water the plants that weren't already dead. He'd apologize to the cat for naming him after a sport neither of them had ever really cared about.

Tonight, he'd just let himself remember how it felt to be almost happy, once, for one electric summer, before the flood.