The Last Game Before Drowning

The storm hit just as we reached the padel court, the sky tearing itself open with that strange purple lightning you only see at three in the morning when you've been awake too long.

Sarah looked like a zombie. Not the movie kind with rotting flesh and outstretched arms, but the real kind—the corporate kind, hollowed out by eighteen-hour days and performance reviews and the quiet understanding that some dreams just don't survive contact with reality. Her movements were jerky, unnatural, like she'd forgotten how to inhabit her own body.

"We're all dead," she said, slamming the ball into the glass wall. "We just haven't stopped moving yet."

The water came down in sheets, turning the court into a slick mirror. I could see us both reflected there—two thirty-somethings in expensive athletic wear, playing a rich person's sport in the middle of the night while pretending we weren't drowning.

I'd been her friend since college. Since before the MBA, before the consulting firm, before the marriage that imploded over text message while she was in a quarterly earnings call. I'd watched her strip away every part of herself that didn't fit the spreadsheet.

"Remember," I said, "when you used to paint?"

She laughed, bitter and sharp. "Remember when you used to write?"

The lightning flashed again, closer this time. The air tasted like ozone and impending something.

"I'm leaving," she said suddenly. "The firm. The city. This." She gestured at nothing and everything. "I rented a place in Costa Rica. No phone. No email. Just... whatever comes next."

"Tomorrow?" I asked, though it wasn't really a question.

"Tonight. The cab's coming at four."

The rain kept falling. We kept playing. Neither of us kept score.

"Come with me," she said.

I thought about my corner office, my deferred compensation plan, the way my therapist kept using the word "trajectory." I thought about how I hadn't felt anything but tired and vaguely anxious in three years.

The lightning struck somewhere nearby, close enough that the hair on my arms stood up. For a second, everything was electric, illuminated, possible.

"I can't," I said.

She nodded. She knew.

We finished the set in silence. When the cab came, I watched her drive away through the rain, toward an airport, toward a life I wasn't brave enough to choose.

The next morning, I went back to the office. The zombie beside me in the elevator caught his reflection in the doors and didn't even recognize himself.

Neither did I.