The Illusion of Buoyancy

The vitamin bottle sat on her nightstand like a small, orange plastic judge. Eleanor, forty-three and freshly separated, stared at it as she downed her morning handful with lukewarm tap water. Vitamin D, she thought bitterly. The sunshine she wasn't getting.

She'd taken up swimming at the YMCA—partially because her therapist had suggested it, partially because the chlorinated silence felt safer than her empty apartment. Six AM, when the water was still and the other lanes held only the elderly breast-strokers who moved through the water like determined tortoises.

The problem was the spinach.

Mark had always been the cook. Their shorthand for "I love you" was his presentation of dinner—steak with red wine reduction, or risotto with whatever fresh herbs he'd picked up at the farmers' market. Now Eleanor stood in the grocery store aisles at 7 PM, paralyzed by options, her cart filling with processed convenience foods that tasted like loneliness.

The spinach kept rotting in her crisper drawer. She'd buy it with good intentions—this week would be different, this week she'd eat like a functional adult—but there it would sit, turning slimy and black, another small failure in a cascade of them.

"You look tired," her mother said over the phone. "Have you been taking your vitamins?"

Eleanor almost laughed. Instead she said, "I've been swimming."

The water had become her only reprieve. She'd push off the wall, and for forty lengths, there was only the rhythmic pull of stroke, breath, kick. No lawyers, no boxes of half-packed belongings, no silent apologies to a mortgage she couldn't afford alone. Just the blue certainty that if she kept moving, the water would hold her up.

But eventually she always had to climb out. Eventually she always had to go home and face the spinach wilting in her refrigerator, another day of not quite managing to keep herself afloat in a world that had suddenly become deeper than she knew how to navigate.

"Maybe tomorrow," she whispered to the empty apartment, downing another handful of orange pills. "Maybe tomorrow I'll figure out how to float."