The Water's Edge

Marcus stood by the lake, watching the water lap against the shore. Dawn was breaking—those pale, bruised colors that remind you of sleepless nights and the particular shade of exhaustion after three years of meaningless presentations and quarterly projections that never seemed to align with human reality.

He felt like a zombie now. Not the Hollywood kind with half-rotted faces and outstretched arms, but something worse: the walking dead who still showered and commuted and smiled in all the right places. The kind whose souls had eroded gradually, like a coastline beaten by invisible tides.

She'd left six months ago. Sarah. She'd said it gently: "Marcus, I can't bear witness to your slow disappearance anymore."

The words echoed in his hollow chest cavity. Bear. Such a small word for such weight.

He'd come here to the cabin they'd rented exactly once, three years ago, when they'd still believed in the myth of weekend getaways saving marriages. The lake was frozen then. Now it murmured against the dock, dark and alive, and Marcus wondered if Sarah had been right.

Had he disappeared? Was the man standing here in wet shoes and a suit that cost three weeks' salary actually anyone at all, or just a collection of habits and postponed grief?

His phone buzzed in his pocket. A Slack notification. Something about the Q3 deliverables and could he circle back with bandwidth.

Marcus watched the water's surface, saw his fractured reflection looking back. For the first time in six months, he didn't recognize the zombie staring back. That man—the one who'd stopped feeling, stopped choosing, stopped bearing witness to his own life—he was ready to die.

The real death would have to wait. But the zombie? Marcus pulled the phone from his pocket, found Sarah's number, and let himself remember what it felt like to need something enough to break.

The water kept moving. That was the thing about living things. They didn't stop.