"you're glowing," she said, but it wasn't a compliment, it was an accusation, like i was betraying some secret pact we'd made to stay submerged, to stay unseen, and i wanted to tell her about cosmo, how he still runs into the ocean every single like he's never seen it before, like he's inventing joy on the spot, and how it feels like that, sometimes, just a theft of gravity, a borrowed aliveness, but she wouldn't hear it, not yet, maybe not ever, because some people need the ache to prove they're real, and maybe that was me, once, the ache under my ribs a kind of proof, but not anymore, now it's the wet sand between my toes, the way the sun burns the back of my neck, the salt on my lips, the way my body knows how to move even when my head is still underwater, still drowning in the before.