The Hour Before Dawn

4:47 AM. The vitamin bottle rattles in my hand—prescription-strength D3, the doctor's orders for a woman who's seen too little sun lately. I dry-swallow two, chasing them with lukewarm coffee that tastes like Monday morning in December.

The cable bill sits on the counter, third notice. I'll pay it when I can bear to look at the numbers. For now, the TV stays dark, which is fine. Easier to pretend I'm not falling behind when I can't see the stock ticker's red digits bleeding across the screen.

My sister-in-law called yesterday. "You're swimming in it," she'd said. "Still swimming in grief, two years later." She meant well, I think. But she doesn't understand that grief isn't water you wade through and leave behind. It's more like—you carry it. A bear on your back, growing heavier each season until you can't remember what it felt like to stand straight.

The gym opens at five. I drive there in darkness, the lone car on wet streets. The pool smells faintly of chlorine and childhood summers, but the adult swim lane is something else entirely. Silent. Methodical. We're all here alone, together—stroke, breathe, stroke, breathe—each of us carrying something the water can't wash away.

The man in lane three has shoulders like a bull, thick and powerful, but he moves with surprising grace. We never speak. We don't need to. We're all just trying to stay afloat in different ways.

At 5:47, I haul myself out, wrapped in a towel that smells like institutional laundry. The vitamin is already dissolving in my stomach, doing whatever it's supposed to do—building bone strength, or maybe just building something to hold me upright for another day.

The cable will wait. The bear will wait. The water will be here tomorrow at five, and so will I, swimming through whatever darkness lies ahead.