The Weight of Water

The pool hadn't been drained in years. Sarah stood at its edge, staring down at the opaque green surface, wondering what else had been left to rot while she was busy running herself into the ground. Three weeks since Marcus left. Seventeen days since she stopped sleeping through the night.

The water level had dropped perhaps an inch—evaporation, or perhaps something thirstier beneath. She remembered how he'd laugh at her fears. 'It's just a pool, Sarah. Not a portal to hell.' But Marcus had never understood how some emptinesses felt alive, how they could stare back.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket—another Slack notification from the team that couldn't function without her for five minutes. She'd been running on coffee and adrenaline for so long that she'd forgotten what rest felt like. The promotion she'd sacrificed everything for now sat on her desk like a trophy from a war she hadn't realized she was fighting.

Sarah knelt by the pool's edge, trailing her fingers through the murky water. Something brushed against her skin—a leaf, or perhaps a memory of last summer, when they'd floated here drunk on cheap wine and the mistaken belief that they had forever. She'd given him the pool in the divorce. He'd given her the mortgage.

A frog broke the surface, startling her. It regarded her with what looked like judgment before diving back under.

'You're right,' she whispered to the ripples. 'I should have learned to swim.'

She stood, knees cracking, and walked back toward the house that was too quiet, too large, too full of everything she'd accumulated but couldn't keep. The running would continue tomorrow—the morning meetings, the quarterly projections, the careful performance of having it all together. But for tonight, Sarah let herself sink onto the concrete edge, feet dangling toward the dark water, and finally let herself miss him.