The Undrowning

The corporate retreat's pool shimmered like something from a magazine I couldn't afford. Forty years old and still pretending this floating hologram of a career meant something. I'd been moving through meetings like a zombie for months now — words leaving my mouth, presentations appearing on screens, bonuses accumulating like plaque in my arteries.

Then I saw Elena by the deep end, martini in hand, laughing with someone from Accounting. She'd been my friend since we were twenty-two and broke, sharing apartments with leaking ceilings and dreams that didn't involve quarterly projections. We'd promised we'd never become them.

She caught my eye. The laugh didn't reach it anymore.

"You look like shit," she said when I reached her, glass already sweating in my palm. "Like you've been dead inside since last November."

"Since the promotion, you mean."

"Since you stopped calling. Since you started commuting three hours each way to live in a house you never see. Since you became what we swore we wouldn't."

Around us, colleagues performed the ritual of networking — phony laughter, strategic seating arrangements, calculated vulnerability. Zombie behavior, all of it. Replicating actions without consciousness, moving through motions that exhausted even as they sustained.

"I'm happy, El."

"Are you?" She set her glass down on the concrete. "Because this morning I saw you staring at the pool for twenty minutes. I thought you were going to walk in fully dressed."

The pool's surface caught the late afternoon sun, refracting it into dancing diamonds. For a moment, I understood the impulse. Not to drown. Just to be something other than what I'd become. Something fluid. Something that could be held and then released.

"I called my mom yesterday," I said. "Had to look up her number."

Elena's hand found mine. Her palm was warm, alive with pulse and memory and all the years we'd spent watching each other survive.

"The difference," she said softly, "is that zombies don't know they're dead. But you — you're still in there somewhere. And that's the part that's killing you."

I looked at the pool again, really looked at it. Not as an escape. As a mirror.

"Help me," I said. "Please. Just help me."

She squeezed my hand. "Start by putting down the drink. Then we'll figure out how to live again."