What Remains Beneath

The chlorine still haunts me. Three years since I last stepped into a pool, but the smell returns sometimes—when it rains, when I'm tired, when I'm alone with the television flickering through another sleepless night.

Marcus was the one who loved it. He'd drag me to the community center at dawn, his gray hair plastered to his forehead, grinning like he'd discovered something miraculous about moving through water. I'd watch him from the shallow end, pretending to swim while actually just studying the way his muscles remembered what mine had forgotten.

"Your hair," he'd say afterward, in the locker room. "It's like seaweed when it's wet. Beautiful." He'd run his fingers through it, and for a moment I'd feel seen, really seen, in a way that had nothing to do with my job or the mortgage or the cable news we watched in silence every evening.

The cable guy came the morning after the funeral. A young guy with acne scars and eyes that avoided mine. I showed him to the living room where Marcus used to fall asleep in his recliner, the remote slipping from his hand. The cable had been flickering for weeks, Marcus said, but he never wanted me to call. "We can just read," he'd say, though we never did.

"This whole line needs replacing," the technician said, and something in me snapped. Not broke—snapped. Like a cable under too much tension for too long.

"Don't bother," I said. "Just disconnect it."

He looked at me like I was crazy. Maybe I was. That was three months ago.

Now I stand in front of the bathroom mirror with a pair of scissors I bought from the drugstore. My hair reaches my shoulders, still thick, still the color Marcus called 'seaweed brown.' It's the only thing about me that hasn't changed.

Outside, the community center is having a swim meet. I can hear the starting whistles, the splashes, muffled but unmistakable. My fingers trace the scars on my knee from the last time I tried to swim laps, tried to be the person Marcus thought I was.

The scissors feel heavy and light at the same time. I don't know what I'm doing—cutting it all off, or just trimming the split ends, or what. I only know that something needs to give, that some things need to be cut away so other things can grow.

The first lock falls to the floor. Then another. And I'm crying, finally crying, watching my hair—our hair, the seaweed he loved—collect around the white tile like something washed up on shore.