What Lightning Reveals

Work had turned me into something that walked and talked and sent quarterly reports but wasn't quite alive. A corporate zombie, really—some hollow thing that remembered having ambitions once, back in my twenties, but now just moved through the motions of a career that had stopped meaning anything years ago.

I floated in the apartment complex pool at 3 AM on a Tuesday, the water cool against my skin, watching storm clouds gather above in bruises of purple and black. The pool was my sanctuary—the only place where the weight of expectations didn't press down on my chest. My hair floated around me like dark seaweed, and I closed my eyes, letting myself drift.

I was 42, divorced, and so exhausted I could feel it in my marrow.

Then lightning cracked the sky open—a blinding white fork that turned the world negative for a heartbeat.

In that flash, I saw her.

She stood at the pool's edge, rain plastering her blouse to her skin, hair wild around her face. She looked as hollowed out as I felt. Something in her expression stopped me from looking away.

"Mind if I join you?" she asked, her voice carrying over the sound of rain on water.

I shook my head. "Be my guest."

She slipped into the pool with a soft splash, and we floated there in companionable silence as lightning continued to strobe the darkness, illuminating our faces in brief, clinical flashes like photos taken in a darkroom.

"We work in the same building," she said after a while. "Fortieth floor. I've seen you at the coffee machine every morning for three years. You always look like you're holding your breath."

"I am," I said. "Waiting for something to happen."

"Me too."

We treaded water and talked—about the corporate death march, about the promotions we'd stopped caring about, about the marriages we'd ended because we'd married people who wanted versions of ourselves we couldn't sustain being. The rain grew heavier. The water buoyed us up, weightless and accepting.

When lightning flashed again, I saw she was crying. Or maybe it was just rain.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"Sarah."

"I'm David."

When Sarah touched my hand under the water, something in me that had been dead for years shivered awake—not desire exactly, but recognition. Like seeing your own ghost and realizing it's more alive than you are.

We didn't kiss. We just floated there as the storm moved overhead, holding hands beneath the water's surface, two zombies learning to be human again.

When we finally got out, shivering and dripping in the rain, she asked, "Same time next week?"

I nodded.

As I walked back to my apartment, I could still feel the water on my skin, the imprint of her hand in mine. The zombie was dead. Long live whatever came next.