The Geometry of Loss

The morning after Mara's funeral, I found myself swimming laps in the community pool at 5 AM, the way I used to when we were twenty-three and everything felt like it could still be fixed. The water was that sterile blue that nothing organic should ever be, and my strokes became a meditation on how many ways I had failed her.

I'd brought an orange with me - one of those sad, out-of-season fruits that taste like wax and nostalgia. Mara used to peel them in perfect spirals, her fingers stained with citrus, while she told me about the pyramids she'd visit someday when her photography career took off. She kept a coffee table book about Giza on our nightstand, right next to her antidepressants.

"You're not my friend anymore," she'd said three weeks before the overdose, but that wasn't true. Friends grow apart. We were something else - two people who'd watched each other's worst moments and stayed anyway, until we couldn't.

Her dog Buster, that neurotic beagle mix she'd rescued from a highway overpass, now lived with me. He stared at me from the patio, his head tilted like he was waiting for an explanation I couldn't give. The irony wasn't lost on me: I'd never wanted children, never wanted pets, and now I was responsible for the one living thing that still carried Mara's scent in his fur.

I got out of the pool, water streaming off me like something being purified. The orange sat on the bench, mocking me with its uncomplicated wholeness. I peeled it carelessly, jagged strips of rind falling to the concrete. Some friend I was.

Buster trotted over as I ate, leaning against my leg the way he used to lean against hers. Maybe that was the thing about pyramids - they're just monuments to people who wanted to be remembered forever, while the rest of us are lucky if someone keeps our dog.

"Okay," I said to him, and to the water, and to the absence that had taken up residence in my chest. "Okay."