What We Left in the Water

The lake was the same impossible blue as the summer we turned thirty, though I noticed now how the cold seeped into my bones faster. I'd been swimming laps for forty minutes when Maggie appeared on the dock, her gray hair loose in the wind.

"You're still chasing the same ghosts," she said, not unkindly.

I treaded water, watching her adjust her reading glasses. "Some ghosts deserve the exercise."

Maggie had been my best friend for twenty years, through two divorces and my mother's slow decline into dementia. But lately, friendship felt like work — the kind you do because you promised, not because it still feeds you.

Her dog, an ancient golden retriever named Bear, limped to the edge of the dock and whined. Bear had been with us since that summer, a puppy then, all teeth and chaos. Now his muzzle was white, his hips failing. The cruelty of loving anything that dies.

"I'm putting him down next week," Maggie said, following my gaze. "He can barely walk to the car anymore."

I swam to the ladder and hauled myself up, water streaming off me like I was dissolving. "I remember when you brought him home. You said you'd never have children. He was going to be your everything."

Maggie's smile was complicated. "I was twenty-five. I didn't know that everything eventually becomes nothing if you live long enough."

We sat in silence, watching the wind ripple the water. I thought about the hair I'd found in my brush this morning — not graying yet, but thinning. About the way my ex-husband had looked at me the last time we'd met, like he was trying to remember why he'd ever loved me. About the friend requests from people I'd deliberately lost touch with, all of them wanting something — sales, connection, validation.

"You know what I miss?" Maggie said finally. "Not being young. Being stupid enough to think we could outsmart loss."

I reached over and squeezed her hand, something we hadn't done in years. "We're still swimming, Mags. That's something."

Bear whined again, and Maggie bent to scratch behind his ears. I looked at the water, at how it held everything we couldn't say — about aging, about the particular ache of watching your friends grow old and die, about the way love becomes something you endure rather than chase.

"Next week," I said. "I'll go with you."

Maggie nodded, not crying, because we were too old for tears to solve anything. "We'll get drunk after. The good scotch."

"And pretend we're twenty-five again," I said, standing up and diving back into the cold blue water, swimming toward nothing at all.