The Lightning That Split Us

I swim laps at the community pool until my muscles scream, until the water feels less like recreation and more like penance. The chlorine burns my eyes, but I keep going, lap after lap, because in the water, I can't hear the silence of my apartment.

Sarah always loved watching me swim. She'd sit on the deck with her legs crossed, reading literary fiction I pretended to understand, while I churned through the water like some kind of useless machine. She called it my "meditative phase," as if I were working toward enlightenment rather than just running from the realization that I'd turned thirty-three without becoming anyone worth being.

We used to have this thing with baseball. Every Sunday, we'd keep score at the minor league stadium, drinking overpriced beer and arguing about statistics that ultimately meant nothing. Sarah would lean into me when the home team hit a double, her breath warm against my neck, and I'd think: this is it, this is what happiness looks like. But happiness, it turns out, is just a seventh-inning stretch—momentary relief before you have to sit back down in the hard plastic seat and watch the game continue without you.

The night she left, lightning crackled across the sky in jagged veins, illuminating her packed suitcase by the door like some terrible prop in a play I hadn't realized I was starring in. She said she couldn't love someone who was constantly underwater, even metaphorically. She needed someone solid, someone who didn't treat their own life like something to be escaped rather than inhabited.

I'd wanted to argue, to explain that the baseball games were real to me, that her presence at the pool had anchored me. But the truth was, she was right. I'd been swimming laps through our entire marriage, my head below the surface while she waited for me to come up for air.

Now I touch the pool wall, gasping, and somewhere beyond the skylight, lightning fractures the darkness. I wonder if Sarah is watching baseball with someone else, someone who knows how to sit in the stadium and really watch the game. Someone who doesn't need the water to feel alive.