We Swim in Circles

The office gym pool at 6 AM — our hour, before the corporate zombies arrive. Sarah and I had been swimming laps together for three years, through two divorces and one promotion she deserved but didn't get. We called it our therapy, though really it was just survival in chlorine.

"You look like shit," she said, sitting on the pool's edge, legs dangling in the water. Her voice echoed off tile walls. Same thing she'd said when I found my husband's secret phone. Same thing she'd said when her mother died.

"Rough night." I adjusted my goggles. "Mark's moving out."

Sarah nodded slowly. She'd warned me about him. A good friend would've said 'I told you so.' She just slipped into the water, cutting the surface clean.

We swam laps side by side. The rhythm was hypnotic — stroke, breathe, stroke, breathe. Underwater, everything muted. I sometimes imagined just staying down there, letting my lungs fill with something heavier than air. Not death exactly. Just... stillness.

But then you break the surface, gasping, and the world rushes back in.

That morning, Sarah stopped mid-lane. She treaded water, watching me approach through the blue distortion.

"I'm leaving," she said. "Got a job offer in Seattle."

The water suddenly felt too heavy. I'd imagined we'd do this forever — these dawn swims, this horizontal friendship where we never had to look each other in the eye while saying the hard things. In the water, you're always a little buoyant. You can float through conversations that would drown you on land.

"When?"

"Month." She dipped beneath the surface, then popped up slick. "Maybe we could write each other."

We both knew we wouldn't.

I watched her swim to the ladder. Her movements through water had always been economical, precise. Mine were desperate, fighting for momentum.

The zombies would be coming soon — the pale-faced office workers, already dead inside, shuffling toward their cubicles. We used to joke that we were different. That the water kept us human.

But watching Sarah walk away, dripping and determined, I understood: we'd all just been swimming in circles all along. The water doesn't save you. It just slows you down enough to notice you're drowning.