John Persons Pool Party -

He took a breath.

He dove underwater to escape the question. The pool muffled everything. For seven seconds, he existed only as weight, only as displacement. Then he surfaced, and the noise returned: laughter, the hiss of a soda can opening, the splash of Kevin’s ten-year-old daughter doing a cannonball.

He took the margarita. The salt stung a small cut on his lip. He didn’t remember getting the cut. Probably from shaving. Or maybe from the dream he’d been having lately, the one where he was drowning in a pool full of broken glass. He didn’t tell Linda about that dream. He didn’t tell her a lot of things anymore. john persons pool party

John nodded. He had felt power once. He had stood in a boardroom in San Francisco, wearing a suit that cost more than his first car, and watched a term sheet get signed. He had felt invincible. He had felt like the laws of thermodynamics did not apply to him. And now he was standing next to a propane grill in his own backyard, listening to a man who sold timeshares describe the feeling of sixty knots.

There was Kevin, the neighbor from three doors down, who brought his own beer and asked John within the first four minutes, “So, how’s the job hunt?” He took a breath

He did not swim. He did not float. He walked to the deep end and stood there, chest-deep, and looked up at the sky. The stars were small and distant and utterly indifferent.

The pool was supposed to be the solution. Two years ago, when John’s startup—a food delivery app called Nosh —was valued at forty million dollars, he had installed the pool as a symbol. Look , the pool said, I am liquid in every sense of the word . But then the venture capital dried up. Then the co-founders left. Then the lawsuits started—small ones at first, like mosquitoes, then larger ones, like wasps. The pool was now a monument to a future that had collapsed. For seven seconds, he existed only as weight,

The filter pump hummed.