Zones of Gray

I'm running when I see it again— that flash of orange in my peripheral vision. Four months after Sarah left, and I'm still chasing ghosts.

6 AM. The pavement is hard under my sneakers, my breath fogging in the cold morning air. I run because when I stop moving, the silence of the apartment presses in like water. Sarah took the cat, too. Barnaby was an orange tabby, more hers than mine, but he slept on my side of the bed every night for seven years. Now I wake up to empty sheets and the hollow realization that I'm alone in a way I haven't been since before I could remember.

The office doesn't help. I sit in meetings and watch my colleagues' mouths move, feeling like a zombie animated by caffeine and spite. We're all dead inside, aren't we? Just zombies in good suits, pretending this quarterly report matters, that the next promotion will finally make us feel alive. Sarah said I died years ago. She said I came home every day and left my body at the door, became something that ate dinner and watched television and slept beside her without really being there.

Maybe she was right.

I turn the corner and there it is again— an orange cat, sitting on a porch railing. Not Barnaby. Just some stray. But it watches me with those same knowing eyes, and I have to stop running because my chest is too tight to breathe.

"Hey," I say, my voice cracking. "You waiting for someone?"

The cat yawns, stretches, and disappears behind the railing. And just like that, I'm thirty-three years old, standing on a stranger's lawn in running clothes I bought because I thought exercise would fix me, talking to a cat that isn't even mine.

The sun starts rising, turning everything orange and gold. For a moment, it's beautiful. For a moment, I feel something like hope. Then I check my watch. 6:47. I need to shower. I have a zombie to play at work, a life to pretend isn't falling apart.

I start running again. I'm good at running now. It's the one thing I haven't failed at yet.