The Weight of Water

The padel court echoed at midnight. Marco's racket hit the ball with a violence that made my teeth ache. Glass walls, enclosed space, the thwack of rubber against asphalt—our Tuesday ritual for six months since the funeral.

"You're playing like shit," he said, retrieving the ball from the corner. Sweat slicked his hair to his skull.

"I'm tired."

"Tired of what? Living?" Marco laughed, but it cracked in the middle.

He knew. Of course he knew. We'd both stopped swimming after she died—the Pacific too vast, too hungry, too ready to take what it had already claimed. Elena had been a mermaid, said the salt ran in her blood. Now the ocean was just a graveyard we avoided.

But this—this glass box of a court, this manufactured competition—was safe. Padel didn't demand you face the abyss. It demanded you serve, return, volley. Simple physics. No room for grief.

"My sister joined a masters swim team," I said, bouncing the ball. "She asked me to come watch."

Marco went still. The fluorescent lights hummed. Outside, somewhere beyond the court's glass walls, water moved in ways we couldn't control.

"And?"

"And I almost said yes."

The ball slipped from my hand and rolled toward the net. We watched it go, neither of us moving to stop it. Some things, once set in motion, you just let happen.

"She would have hated this," Marco said finally. "Us, pretending that hitting a ball around a glass cage fixes anything."

"She loved padel."

"She loved that we played together. She hated that we stopped swimming." He met my eyes across the court. "She said the water was the only place she felt whole."

The silence stretched, thick and salt-heavy. I thought of her body in the Pacific, of all that water holding her like a promise.

"Tomorrow," I said. "The pool at 5 AM."

Marco nodded once.

We finished our game in silence. The ball kept hitting the walls, echoing back, each return a small act of resistance against everything we'd lost. Tomorrow we'd swim. Tonight, we just let the ball bounce back to us, again and again, until our arms burned and the glass walls blurred with tears we refused to acknowledge.