The Seventh Inning

The iPhone buzzed on Dan's nightstand at 3 AM, the screen's blue light seeping into his insomnia like water into a sinking ship. A notification from Mark—his best friend from college, the one who'd drifted away somewhere between promotions and mortgages. 'You awake?'

Dan hadn't spoken to Mark in two years, not since the funeral. But he'd thought about him every time he opened that baseball app on his phone, the one Mark had made him download so they could track each other's fantasy league. The league that had died along with Mark's wife, Sarah.

'Yeah,' Dan typed. 'You?'

'Can't sleep. Found Sarah's old phone tonight. Cleaned out the attic.'

A pause. Then: 'She kept our texts.'

Dan felt the weight of his own phone, how it held everything and nothing at all. The baseball games they'd watched together, the way Sarah had cheered like each pitch mattered, how she'd made Mark delete his dating apps after their first date. The thousand small moments that accumulated into a life.

'I'm a zombie without her,' Mark wrote. 'I go to work, I come home, I sleep. Repeat. I don't even remember what day it is half the time.'

Dan thought about his own marriage, how he and Lisa had become roommates who shared a bed and a Netflix subscription. The fights they weren't having, the conversations they weren't starting, all buried under the crushing weight of routines and expectations. Sometimes he felt like he'd been buried alive, walking through his days on autopilot.

'Spring training starts next week,' Dan typed finally. 'Remember how Sarah made us watch those boring preseason games?'

A long pause. Dan imagined Mark sitting in the dark, holding Sarah's phone like a holy relic.

'Yeah,' Mark wrote. 'Yeah, she did.'

The baseball season would start again. The world would keep turning. People would die and be born, love and lose, and somewhere in all that tragedy and beauty, they'd keep going. Even when it felt like being the walking dead.

'I'll pick you up for the opener,' Dan wrote. 'Seven AM.'

'Bring coffee,' Mark replied. 'She liked it when we went.'

And for the first time in two years, Dan didn't feel like he was sleepwalking through his own life.