Underneath

The pool was empty at 11 PM, which was exactly what Mark needed. His iphone lay on a deck chair, screen lighting up every few minutes with work emails he'd stopped answering three hours ago.

He'd come here to swim, but mostly he'd come here to not be anywhere else.

The water was still—chlorine and silence. He slid beneath the surface, letting the water close over his head. Down here, everything was muffled and blue. The iphone's frantic blinking couldn't reach him. His father's voice couldn't reach him, though the memory was loud enough: "You're thirty-five, Mark. When do you start acting like it?"

His father had loved baseball. Mark remembered sitting in the stands, eight years old, watching his father coach third base, all urgency and strategy. "You gotta know when to swing," he'd say, beer on his breath. "You can't just stand there waiting for the perfect pitch."

Mark had never been good at swinging.

He surfaced, gasping. The air felt sharp, wrong. On the chair, his iphone buzzed again—Sarah this time. His ex-wife wanted to know if he'd forgotten about their daughter's birthday next week. He hadn't forgotten. He'd just frozen.

Beneath the water again, weightless and suspended, he imagined staying down forever. Not dying—that was too dramatic. Just staying submerged, breathing water instead of air, becoming something else entirely. Something that didn't owe emails or child support or explanations.

His lungs burned. He forced himself up, breaking the surface with a splash.

The iphone screen showed a notification: his daughter's school baseball team was playing in the championship game Saturday. She'd asked him to come. He'd said maybe, which they both knew meant no.

Mark hauled himself out of the water, dripping and cold. He picked up the phone, scrolled through the messages he'd been avoiding. At the bottom, an old photo: his daughter in her uniform, grinning, holding a bat like she meant it.

He typed: "I'll be there."

Then he deleted his father's number and walked toward the locker room, leaving his phone on the chair. The water had been easier. But sometimes you had to surface anyway.