Three Months Post-Cord

The cable lay coiled on the floor like a dead snake, its plastic skin still warm from where she'd yanked it from the wall. Sixty days without television, without the numbing blue glow that had replaced actual conversation in their apartment. Elena slept on the couch now, claiming the bed smelled like him. Like sandalwood and the particular brand of laundry detergent he'd refused to change because his mother had bought it in bulk from Costco.

Marc moved through his days like a zombie, not the movie kind with their grotesque lurching and hunger, but the quiet kind—the ones who still showered and showed up to work and laughed at the right moments during meetings. His soul had simply forgotten how to inhabit his body properly. He walked into walls. He put his phone in the refrigerator.

"You coming to padel tonight?" David asked, not looking up from his spreadsheet. "Jordan's partner bailed."

"Sure." Marc always said sure. It was easier than explaining that the last thing he wanted was to hit a ball with a racquet while pretending everything was fine. But padel was better than the apartment, better than sitting across from Elena and watching the goldfish—his goldfish, technically—swim in endless circles in their tank on the counter. The fish had survived the breakup. The fish didn't care that the apartment had become a silent war zone where even the coffee maker seemed to be holding its breath.

The courts were indoors, smelling vaguely of rubber and teenage sweat. Jordan was already there, stretching hamstrings that had clearly seen too much desk work. "Rough week?" he asked, and Marc laughed, because of course it had been a rough week. Every week had been a rough week since Sarah left. Since she'd looked at him across their anniversary dinner and said she couldn't do it anymore—couldn't do the version of him that had emerged somewhere between the promotion and the mortgage and the slow realization that adulthood was mostly just maintaining things until they broke.

"You're being such a bull about this," she'd said. "Everything's a fight with you now."

He hadn't known how to tell her that he wasn't fighting her—he was fighting the way his life had become a series of checkboxes and automated payments and carefully curated social media posts. He was fighting the hollow space where something real was supposed to be.

The game began. Marc hit the ball harder than necessary, harder than the friendly match demanded. The rubber wall absorbed the impact, the ball ricocheting back at impossible angles. His body remembered what his mind had forgotten: movement, impact, the simple satisfaction of striking something and watching it bounce back.

Afterward, they sat on the bench, dripping sweat, drinking lukewarm water from plastic bottles. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead.

"My wife wants fish," Jordan said suddenly. "Goldfish. For the kids."

Marc thought of the two orange shapes swimming in terrified circles above his sink. "They're easy," he said. "Until they're not."

He went home that night and found the cable still on the floor, Elena asleep on the couch, the goldfish swimming in their endless loop. He sat on the floor and watched them, thinking about circuits and connections and how sometimes you have to cut something to realize it was never really attached to anything that mattered.