The Last Night of Maya

The corporate retreat was bleeding into its third hour, and Maya could feel the carefully constructed walls of her life beginning to crumble. She watched from the balcony as her colleagues swam in the infinity pool below, their bodies cutting through the turquoise water like sleek, determined fish. They were all swimming upstream toward a promotion that wouldn't make any of them whole.

Her phone buzzed — a message from her mother asking about the spinach casserole recipe, as if recipes were the kind of thing that got passed down anymore. Maya stared at her palm, where a small tremor had taken up residence last month, just before she'd stopped sleeping through the night. The doctor called it stress. She called it the accumulated weight of thirty-five years spent climbing a pyramid scheme of someone else's design.

'You're not yourself lately,' David had told her that morning, his eyes avoiding hers as he adjusted his tie. He'd stopped looking at her months ago — really looking — the way he used to when they were young and broke and believed that love alone could sustain them. Now they had a mortgage, two cars, and a marriage that felt like a piece of spinach stuck between their teeth: uncomfortable, impossible to ignore, but neither one willing to be the first to reach in and pull it out.

Down by the pool, someone laughed. The sound carried up to her like glass breaking. Maya closed her eyes and let herself imagine what it would mean to simply walk away from the pyramid, to stop climbing, to finally stop swimming against a current that had been pushing her under for years.

Instead, she opened her eyes, checked her reflection in the darkened glass of the balcony door, and forced herself to smile. Tomorrow, she promised herself. Tomorrow would be different. Tonight, she would go downstairs and drink too much wine and pretend that everything was exactly as it should be.