The Undead We Become

The goldfish died three weeks after Sarah left. I found it floating on its side, that terrible stillness that had started to permeate everything in our apartment. I flushed it without ceremony, watching it spiral away like my marriage.

I'd become a zombie in my own life—moving through meetings at the firm, nodding at the right times, signing documents that meant nothing. My colleagues noticed the change. "You look like death," Karen from HR said, her orange fingernails clicking against her desk as she signed my leave request.

"Just tired," I lied.

The truth was simpler and harder: I was 38, divorced, and sleeping in the guest room of my brother's house. My niece watched me with concerned eyes from doorways, like I might bite.

Then I found the hat.

It was tucked behind a box of old tax returns in the basement—Sarah's fox hat, that ridiculous thing she'd worn on our first date. The one that made her look like a sophisticated woodland creature trying to pass as human in a downtown bar. She'd ordered two more drinks than she needed and told me about her mother's funeral, and I'd fallen in love somewhere between her third whiskey and the fox hat's tilted ear.

I put it on. In the mirror, a dead man stared back wearing his dead wife's ridiculous hat.

Something cracked open in my chest—grief, yes, but also the terrible recognition that I had allowed myself to become undead. That somewhere between the mortgage and the mergers, between the silent dinners and the sleeping in separate rooms, I had forgotten how to be alive.

I took off the hat carefully. Folded it. Put it in the box with the tax returns.

Then I called Karen from HR and told her I wasn't coming back. Not yet. Maybe not ever. I needed to learn how to exist again first.