The Pool Where We Drowned Our Youth

The water in the **pool** had that peculiar stillness of early September, surface tension barely holding against the weight of everything we weren't saying. Sarah sat on the edge, legs dangling in, while I stood in the shallow end, water lapping at my ankles like a guilty conscience that wouldn't let me sleep. The suburbs were quiet around us, distant hum of traffic the only reminder that the world kept moving even when ours had stopped.

"The problem with being forty-two," Sarah said, swirling her hand through the water, "is that **running** away stopped being an option somewhere around thirty-five. Now you just have to stay and watch it fall apart."

I thought about that for a moment, about how we'd spent two decades **running** from responsibility, from commitment, from the very lives we claimed to want. We'd been sprinting through our twenties and jogging through our thirties, and now suddenly we were standing still, and neither of us knew what to do with that stillness.

Her **dog** Buster, old now and graying around the muzzle, lay on the concrete nearby, watching us with those judging eyes that dogs somehow develop when they've seen you at your worst too many times. He'd been a chaotic, absurd puppy when we first met, a force of joy that neither of us knew how to handle properly. Now he just seemed tired, like the rest of us.

"Remember the **bull** market?" I asked suddenly. "When we thought we'd be rich by thirty?"

She laughed, but it was a hollow sound. "That **bull** never came. We just kept waiting for something that wasn't ever going to show up."

I'm not sure when it happened — when being best **friend**s became something we said about each other in past tense, when our weekly dinners became monthly, then quarterly, then something we'd promise to reschedule. Maybe it was her divorce two years ago, or the promotion I got that she didn't, or simply the slow erosion that comes when you stop making the effort. When you stop choosing someone.

"You're not really here anymore," I said, finally. "Even when you're here."

She looked up then, and the sadness in her eyes was familiar and devastating, like looking in a mirror after too many years. We'd been each other's person through three marriages, two career changes, one crisis of faith, and countless bad decisions. Now we were just two people who used to matter to each other, sitting by a **pool** that represented everything we'd bought but couldn't enjoy.

"I'm tired," she said, her voice cracking. "I'm so tired of pretending this still works. That we still work."

The **pool** lights flickered on automatically, casting blue ripples across her face. I realized then that some friendships have expiration dates, no matter how much you want them to last. The water was cold, but getting out seemed worse than staying in. So I stayed, and she stayed, and we pretended not to notice that we were already drowning.