Tropical Depression

The papaya sat on the white ceramic plate, its orange flesh glistening with tropical humidity. She'd ordered it because the blog said it helped with cervical mucus production. Everything she ate now had a purpose, a job to do in the increasingly elaborate project of becoming pregnant.

Her iPhone buzzed against the patio table. Another pregnancy announcement on Instagram. Sarah from college, who'd sworn she'd never have kids, was posting a tiny onesie with DUE OCTOBER. Marissa shoved the phone face-down without even double-tapping to like it. She wasn't a monster, but she wasn't a saint either.

"You okay?" David asked, not looking up from his book.

"Fine. Just work stuff."

He nodded. They'd stopped talking about it three months ago, after the fight where she'd thrown the **vitamin** supplements across the room and he'd asked, terrified, if this was what their marriage had become. Now they just moved through the days like swimmers underwater, everything muffled and slow and holding their breath.

The **pool** glittered below their balcony, impossibly blue. A family splashed in the shallow end—a toddler on floaties, a father tossing a ball. The mother sat in a lounge chair, scrolling through her phone, looking exactly like Marissa probably looked from a distance. Like she was waiting for something that wasn't coming.

"I'm going down for a swim," Marissa said.

David looked up then. His eyes were kind. That was almost worse. "Want company?"

"No. I just need... I need to be in the **water**."

She'd read somewhere about baptism by immersion. How going under and coming up again could remake you. It seemed like bullshit now, like the papaya and the temperature tracking and the acupuncture. But she lowered herself into the cool blue anyway, let it close over her head, and for a moment held perfectly still beneath the surface, suspended in a world where nothing needed to happen yet.

When she broke the surface, gasping, the woman from the family was watching her from the edge of the pool. The woman raised her phone, mouthed "nice photo?" with a questioning tilt.

Marissa shook her head no, treaded **water**, watched her husband appear on their balcony above, silhouetted against the sky. Some things you couldn't capture. Some things you had to just keep floating through, hoping you'd find shore eventually, or learn to breathe in the deep end.

She went under again, stayed down until her lungs burned, letting herself believe, just for that suspended moment, that anything was still possible.