The Last Breath Before Morning

The iphone illuminated Elena's face at 3:14 AM, its blue glow casting her in spectral light as she scrolled through messages from a year ago. The digital ghost of David, frozen in amber text, laughed at some joke she couldn't remember making. She'd deleted the photos months ago, but something about the words—so confident, so alive—made her keep these final transcripts like archaeological evidence of a happiness she'd once inhabited.

Barnaby, her elderly golden retriever, stirred at her feet. His muzzle had gone white this winter, another small erosion she'd stopped fighting. When he looked up at her with milky eyes, she felt the weight of his twelve years pressing against her own thirty-seven. They were both becoming something new—something slower, something that needed more rest.

The delivery had arrived yesterday: three bags of organic spinach, ordered at 2 AM during another bout of insomnia-induced optimism. Now they sat in her refrigerator, a monument to the person she pretended to be during daylight hours. The kind of person who made green smoothies and ran before dawn. Instead, she stood here, reading dead conversations while fresh produce decayed in silence.

"You're in zombie mode again," her sister had said over lunch yesterday, watching Elena pick at her food. "It's been eight months. You're walking through your own life like you're haunting it."

Elena had wanted to protest, to explain that grief didn't work on a schedule, that she was trying, really trying. But the word had landed with terrible precision. Zombie. Something that moved without being alive, something that consumed without ever being full.

Her phone buzzed. A calendar reminder: Padel tournament tomorrow, 7 AM. She'd signed up three weeks ago, another desperate attempt at normalcy. David had loved padel—how he'd laughed when she'd mispronounced it "paddle" their first time playing. The memory should have made her smile. Instead, it just made her tired.

Barnaby whined softly, sensing something in the shift of her weight. Elena sank to the kitchen floor, letting the cold tiles press against her legs. The dog arranged himself beside her, his familiar weight grounding her in this moment, in this room, in this life that kept demanding to be lived.

"Okay," she whispered to the darkness. "Okay."

She deleted the messages. All of them. Then she opened her calendar and declined the tournament. Tomorrow, she would sleep. Tomorrow, she would make those spinach smoothies. Tomorrow, she would call her sister and say, simply: "I think I'm ready to try again."

The iphone went dark, and for the first time in months, Elena didn't reach to turn it back on.