The Unliving Game

The chlorine stung her eyes, but she kept swimming. Laps. Back and forth in the infinity pool of the resort where her company had sent them for 'team building' — that corporate euphemism for forced intimacy with people she saw forty hours a week but barely knew.

She emerged from the water, her body moving on autopilot. The zombie hours, she called them. The period between 3 PM and quitting time when she was physically present but somewhere else entirely, her mind wandering through mortgage payments and unreturned texts and the peculiar ache of being thirty-three and exactly where she'd planned to be, yet somehow entirely lost.

'You're good,' a voice said.

Marcus from accounting. He was holding two padel racquets, grinning that hungry grin of his. 'Up for a match?'

She hesitated. Padel had been this year's corporate obsession — everyone playing, everyone talking about it, another thing to feign enthusiasm for while her actual enthusiasm for anything dissolved like sugar in cold water.

'Why not,' she found herself saying.

They played. The ball sailed back and forth. She stopped thinking about emails and quarterly reports. She stopped thinking about being a zombie. For the first time in months, she was simply there — the thwack of the ball, the sweat on her skin, the way Marcus laughed when she missed an easy shot, the way she laughed too.

Afterward, they sat by the pool, legs dangling in the water. Neither spoke for a long time.

'Sometimes I think we're all just swimming in circles,' she said.

Marcus nodded slowly. 'But at least we're swimming.'

She looked at him — really looked at him — and felt something stir in her chest. Not electricity, exactly. Something quieter. Something like recognition.

'Match tomorrow?' she asked.

He smiled. 'Tomorrow.'

She walked back to her room feeling suddenly, miraculously alive.