What Drowns in Shallow Water

The iphone buzzed on the nightstand at 3 AM — Marco's old phone, still charging on what would have been his 34th birthday. Elena had refused to deactivate his number. Some part of her needed the possibility that he might still reach through, that death wasn't final but merely another form of disconnection.

She picked it up. Another notification from his social media account, now a zombie profile automated by an algorithm that knew nothing of grief. The system posted old memories on autopilot: Marco laughing at a party, Marco raising a glass, Marco with saltwater in his hair after their last real swimming trip to the coast.

Three months since the accident. Three months of their mutual friends whispering about how she should move on, how her obsession with his digital afterlife wasn't healthy. They didn't understand that Marco had lived half his life through screens — his iphone contained more of his thoughts than his journals ever had. His unspoken fears. The message draft he'd never sent: *I think I'm drowning, El. Not in water. In something I can't name.*

She padded to the kitchen in the dark, bare feet on cold tile. The house felt like a body whose organs had been harvested — functional but hollow. Outside, rain sheeted down the windows, distorting the streetlights into smeared watercolor ghosts.

At the sink, she filled a glass. Water swirling, catching moonlight. Marco used to talk about the Japanese concept of *mono no aware* — the bittersweetness of transient things. How beauty intensifies because it ends. He'd quoted it after his mother died, after they put his childhood dog to sleep, during that last swimming trip when he'd floated on his back staring at a sky bruised with approaching storm clouds.

*"The water remembers everything,"* he'd said. *"That's why it keeps returning. The same water that fell on dinosaurs falls on us now. We're all just borrowing it."*

She'd thought he was being poetic. Now she wondered if he was saying goodbye.

The iphone lit up again. A friend request from someone Marco had known years ago — someone who hadn't heard yet. Elena hovered over decline, but her finger wouldn't press the button. Accepting meant acknowledging the profile's strange persistence, this digital limbo where Marco remained perpetually 33, forever tagged in photos, forever commenting on birthdays he'd never see.

She carried the phone to the bathroom, turned on the faucet. Watched water rise in the sink, curling around the drain. Not to drown it — destruction felt too final, too like erasure. Instead she placed the phone upright on the counter, screen facing the mirror, where Marco's lock screen photo — her sleeping, curled in a blanket fort they'd built during a hurricane — reflected back at her.

"I miss you," she whispered to the glass surface, to the water still running, to the emptiness that had taken up residence in her chest like a slow tide. "I don't know how to be your friend when you're not here."

Outside, rain intensified. The yard flooding, the drain clogged with leaves. Water rising against the foundation like it might wash the house away, or perhaps carry it somewhere else entirely — somewhere Marco might still be waiting, somewhere between the silence and the signal, between the shallow end and the deep.