What the Body Remembers

The orange sunset bled into the waiting room windows, casting everything in a sickly amber glow. Mara sat with the prescription bottle in her hand — prenatal vitamins, the doctor had called them, though she and Julian had stopped trying six months ago. She'd forgotten to throw them away.

'You're staring at that bottle like it might bite,' Julian said from across the room. He hadn't looked up from his phone.

'I'm just remembering.' Mara's voice was quiet. 'Remember when we went to that cabin in Montana? The one with the lake where we went swimming at dawn?'

Julian finally looked up. His expression was unreadable. 'That was three years ago, Mara.'

'I know.' She turned the vitamin bottle in her hands. 'There was that moment in the water. You said you felt like you could float forever. You said you'd never felt that light before in your life.' She paused. 'You said you wanted that feeling to be our life.'

'I also said I'd quit smoking,' Julian said dryly. 'We say things. Things change.'

'Do they?' Mara set the bottle on the table between them. 'Or do we just get tired of bearing the weight of what we meant?'

The word hung between them — bearing, like the weight they'd both carried, like the burden of expectations neither could meet anymore. Julian's shoulders slumped. The fight went out of him.

'I'm not that person anymore,' he said softly. 'The one who swam at dawn and believed in forever.'

'Me either.' Mara stood up. 'But I think I need to find out who I am now. Alone.'

The orange light faded to gray. Outside, somewhere in the distance, a car alarm started. In the silence that followed, Julian nodded once, almost imperceptibly. They both knew some things, once broken, couldn't be fixed with vitamins or vows or the memory of swimming toward something they'd lost the strength to reach.