The Lightning in the Cable

The baseball stadium lights flickered above us, that horrible orange glow that makes everyone look like they're about to be sick. Elena sat three rows down, her hand on another man's shoulder. His suit was expensive, the kind I used to promise her I'd wear to corporate galas before the startup collapsed under the weight of its own hubris.

I'd become something pathetic in the six months since she moved out—a spy in my own life, memorizing her coffee orders from her Instagram stories, timing my grocery runs to when she might be at Whole Foods. The cable guy had found me like this last week, curled around my laptop in the dark, watching her location dot move around the city through a shared Netflix account I'd forgotten to close.

"You need to get out more," he'd said, threading thick black cables through my walls like he was suturing wounds. "You've got that look people get when they forget they're alive."

Now thunder cracked across the stadium roof. The players scattered. Everyone else ran for cover. But I sat there watching Elena laugh at something the suit said, her head tilting back exactly the way it used to when I made terrible jokes about my failures. That was the thing about grief—it wasn't the big moments that destroyed you. It was the baseball games on Sunday afternoons, the empty hook where the cable modem used to be, the way oranges in the grocery store suddenly reminded you of breakfasts you'd never eat again.

Lightning struck the transformer outside. The stadium went black.

In that darkness, something else struck—something I hadn't felt in months. Not jealousy. Not longing. Something else entirely. The realization that I'd been haunting a life that no longer existed, that the person I was mourning was a version of myself that died when she walked out the door.

When the emergency lights flickered on, Elena was gone. The seat beside the suit was empty. Both of them.

I stood up, stretched my legs, and walked toward the exit. The cable guy was right. It was time to remember I was still here, still alive, still capable of eventually being okay with that.