by thousands

Sadie holds her breath under the water and slowly counts to ten by thousands. One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand. When she breaks the surface, things will be different. The world will have changed between the time that she dipped her head under the horizon and when she emerges. Four one thousand, five one thousand. The world changes by seconds, she knows, whether she’s under water or not. Seconds and less than seconds, infinitely and forever. Six one thousand, seven one thousand. But in this case, Sadie wants specific change. Eight one thousand, nine one thousand. When Sadie lifts her head out of the chlorinated pool and looks around her, she wants to see that her life is markedly and noticeably different, that she is ten pounds lighter or that there is no boring office job to return to or that Greg is not still sitting poolside flirting with the Swede from room 202. When she lifts her head out of the water, Sadie wants it all to be new.

++

Back on the east coast it is snowing. A blizzard, in fact. Sadie called her mom when they checked into the hotel, and her mom told her that Buffalo got twenty inches. Sadie thought that was a weird statistic to share, since no one they knew lived in Buffalo, but she let it go. Sadie has been letting everything go lately. She likes to think she’s attempting a Buddhist form of non-attachment, but she suspects it’s just a more mundane giving up. Even the trip here to the Keys was a giving up. Greg asked if she wanted to skip out on the holidays and go sit in the sun, swim in the ocean, drink cocktails by the pool. Sadie didn’t. She wanted to go visit her best friend in Portland, hang out in coffee shops, listen to bands, get drunk in bars. Sadie hates the relentless sunshine; she prefers the calmness of overcast, rainy days. But Greg’s question was more of a statement, like he knew she’d be excited, like he’d already gotten the tickets, like he only wanted confirmation. So she’d said sure, okay. He’d pulled the tickets out of his back pocket with a grin and handed them to her. Surprise.

++

Sadie has been dating Greg for exactly one year and six days, and she thinks that if she wasn’t so busy giving up, one year and six days would be just about long enough. She doesn’t understand why Greg doesn’t realize he feels the same way. It’s obvious he feels the same way, when he spends much of their first two vacation days chatting up lovely Swedish ladies by the pool.

++

In a move that surprised even herself, Sadie packed a sketchpad for the trip. She wasn’t sure why; she hasn’t sketched in over a year. Or painted. Or even doodled. Not since before she met Greg. In fact, if Sadie thinks about it, which she begins to do as she waits in the airport and thumbs through trashy celeb magazines, she stopped drawing around the same time she started working reception, because she thought benefits would be nice for a change. Which was around the same time that her best friend moved to Portland and she started going to clubs she wouldn’t have been caught dead in before, because that’s where her work friends were going. Which is how she met Greg. Who came after Adam. Who she met when she was bartending and who was an artist too and the two of them used to spend whole Saturday mornings sitting at the coffee shop together, sketching out notebooks worth of the ridiculous and the sublime.

++

Adam. Adam was the last time that Sadie remembers anything being well and truly new. It is halfway through this line of thought that Sadie begins to suspect she is giving up on the wrong things.

++

Under the water Sadie’s lungs are starting to burn. She’s counted by thousands up to nine, but it’s so peaceful down there she couldn’t bring herself to finish. The kids that are usually infesting the pool must all be at lunch or enforced naps, and the tourists are out doing touristy things. Miraculously, they’ve got the pool almost entirely to themselves, just Sadie and Greg and two other couples and the Swedes. Sadie is the only one in the water, posed in what they called the dead man’s float when she was a kid. She plans to stay in there as long as her lungs can hold.

++

A memory floats back to her, under the water. When Sadie was eleven, her grandmother came to visit. It was only her second trip, and since it was summer, the family took her to Coney Island. Sadie showed off her knowledge of the boardwalk, and steered her grandmother toward the shops and games, but her grandmother made a beeline for the Cyclone. She had never been on a rollercoaster before, she told Sadie. They didn’t have them in the old country. Sadie’s parents had gone for hot dogs, and Sadie wasn’t sure what to do. She was worried for her frail, seventy-two-year-old grandmother in general, never mind in a wooden car on a rickety rollercoaster that was older than she was. Sadie tried to talk her out of it. She told her grandmother that she wasn’t missing anything, that the coaster was overrated, that there was nothing exciting about it at all.

“So says you,” her grandmother answered. “Maybe it is true, but how will I know except to try? When you stop trying, Sadie, your life becomes blah. My life has been blah for too long.” She grabbed Sadie’s hand and marched her into the line, and nothing Sadie said during the wait could deter her.

Finally, they reached the front and were put, to Sadie’s utter horror, in the very first car of the coaster. As they were strapped in, Sadie’s grandmother turned to her granddaughter and grabbed her hand.

“The only way to get through this world,” she told Sadie, “is to flee from the blah and chase after every new thing with a greedy heart.”

++

Sadie feels the first drops hit her back just as she’s beginning to see spots from lack of air. Raindrops. It’s raining, a summer storm. Through the strange echo chamber of the water she can hear the Swedes sending up fake shrieks at the idea of getting wet, and she hears footsteps running for the hotel. Sadie stays in the dead man’s float a moment longer, until the drops have become a torrent, real water covering her better than the chlorinated stuff ever could. She drops to the bottom of the pool in a crouch, ready to burst up, and opens her eyes to the rain clouds overhead, to the new and different sky that’s waiting.

One one thousand, two one thousand

Ten.