The Weight of Empty Courts

The padel court sat empty beneath sodium lights, its artificial turf glowing like a toxic sea. Elena stood at the mesh fence, her fingers wrapped through the diamond-shaped openings, remembering how Marco's laugh had echoed off these walls just three months ago. They'd played Sunday evenings for two years—his terrible backhand, her competitive streak, the way they'd collapse onto the bench afterward, sweat-cooled and breathless, discussing nothing and everything.

Now she was seeing someone new. David was stable, employed, owned a dog named Buster—a golden retriever with earnest eyes and none of the chaos that had defined Marco. Her mother approved. Her friends said she'd made the right choice, moving on. They didn't say: *from the wreckage.* They didn't say: *from the bipolar diagnosis that arrived two weeks after the funeral.*

Last night, while David slept beside her, Elena had dreamed of Marco again. In the dream, he'd turned into a bear—massive, fur matted with burrs, staggering through some dark forest with salmon thrashing in his jaws. She'd reached out to touch his shoulder, and he'd looked at her with human eyes full of such terrible sorrow that she'd woken gasping, tears already pooling in her clavicles. David had mumbled something about the cat scratching at the door, rolled over, returned to sleep.

That cat—a scrawny tabby named Wednesday that Marco had rescued as a kitten—still slept at the foot of Elena's bed. Sometimes she hated the animal for its endurance, its refusal to die like everything else.

"You coming?" David called from the parking lot. He'd brought his padel racket. A new beginning, or something performative in its shape.

Elena's phone buzzed. Marco's mother, asking if she wanted the old trophies. Something about clearing out the apartment.

The bear of it opened its jaws again. Not the forest dream—the weight that lived in her chest, patient and impossible to bear down into something smaller. Some days she thought she'd never love anything properly again. Other days, like today, she thought the problem was that she loved too many broken things at once.

"Give me a minute," she called back to David. Then, to the empty court: "I'm sorry I couldn't save you."

The dog barked somewhere in the distance. The cat waited at home. Elena's fingers tightened around the fence diamonds. Behind her, a new life waited, stable and afraid of the dark. Ahead, the court sat empty, illuminated for ghosts.

She didn't move.