The Lightning That Broke

The goldfish died three days after Sarah left, which felt like some kind of cosmic joke. I'd won it at a carnival years ago—a plastic bag containing a living creature that wasn't supposed to survive the weekend. Instead, it swam through my twenties, three apartments, and one marriage.

Now I stood at the kitchen counter, baseball game playing muted on the television behind me, flushing the last trace of that orange fish down the toilet. It had outlasted my marriage by six months.

I'd become something else since the divorce—not exactly alive, not exactly dead. A zombie in a button-down shirt, going through motions at the office, responding to emails about quarterly projections while something inside me rotted. My coworkers probably didn't notice. People rarely do.

The baseball game went into extra innings. Outside, a storm was building. I found myself driving toward the old ballpark, though I hadn't watched a live game in years. Sarah had loved baseball. Something inherited from her father, something I'd never really understood but pretended to for her sake.

Lightning cracked the sky as I parked. One flash, then another, closer now. Rain began falling, hard and sudden. I sat in my car, windows down, letting myself get soaked, watching the empty stadium lights flicker against the dark.

And then I understood: I wasn't mourning Sarah. I was mourning who I'd been when I loved someone enough to pretend to understand baseball, who kept a carnival goldfish alive for a decade, who believed in small, ridiculous commitments.

The lightning illuminated everything—my choices, my cowardice, the long decay that had begun years before she finally walked out. Zombies don't always eat brains. Sometimes they just live in them, renting out space where a person used to be.

I started the car. I didn't know where I was going, but somewhere, somewhere else, it was still possible to be something that wasn't dead inside. That had to be true. It had to.