The Last Summer of Trying

Margot stood on the balcony of the timeshare she'd bought with money she didn't have, watching the sun dip behind the ocean. The palm fronds cast shadows across her face like cracks in a porcelain vase. At forty-three, she'd stopped believing in fresh starts, but here she was, anyway, swallowing a handful of supplements each morning as if her body could still be tricked into renewal.

The vitamin D sat bitter on her tongue—a small pharmaceutical surrender to the fact that she'd spent too many years inside fluorescent-lit offices, trading daylight for promotions that now felt like punchlines to jokes she didn't remember telling.

"You're swimming again," David had said the last time they spoke, his voice flattening through the phone line. "Just swimming in circles."

He wasn't wrong. The divorce papers sat in her bag like a dead thing. Three weeks ago, she'd found him crying in the kitchen at 3 AM, clutching their dog's old leash like a rosary. Buster had been gone two years, but grief, she was learning, had its own circadian rhythm.

She pressed her palm against the balcony railing, feeling the rust flake onto her skin. The couple in the adjacent unit was fighting again—words muffled by sliding glass, the cadence of disappointment universal across time zones. Margot wondered if they'd look back on this vacation as the beginning or the end.

The next morning, she swam out farther than she should have, until the hotel became a smudge of pastel and the ocean floor dropped away into darkness. She floated on her back, salt stinging her eyes, and let herself believe, for just a moment, that she could dissolve into something infinite. That she could become something other than a woman who had mistaken accumulation for progress.

When she finally dragged herself back to shore, coughing up seawater, she found a stray dog sleeping under her beach chair. It lifted its head at her approach, tail thumping once, twice—a small, tentative rhythm she felt in her chest.

"Yeah," she whispered, digging into her beach bag for the protein bar she'd packed. "I know."

She sat with the dog until the sun began to set, feeding it pieces of processed chocolate and pretending not to notice the way its ribs pressed against its matted fur. Some things, she decided, were not meant to be fixed. Some things were just meant to be witnessed.

Back in the room, she flushed the vitamins down the toilet.