I tore it open with my thumb, breath held tight in my throat.
We regret to inform you …
The rest blurred.
I blinked, refocused.
… funding contract terminates in fourteen days.
Fourteen.
Two weeks until everything I’d built my life around—my schedule, my training, my housing—evaporated. I reread the paragraph three times, hoping the words would magically rearrange into something less catastrophic.
They didn’t.
I sank onto the couch, elbows on my knees, the letter held loosely in my shaking hands.
It wasn’t like this was a surprise, not completely. Coach had warned me the sponsorship was unstable. The economy was trash. Funding wasn’t guaranteed. But hearing it and seeing it printed in crisp, corporate font were two very different things.
The more I stared at the page, the smaller I felt. Like the letter wasn’t paper but a fist closing around my lungs.
I tried to breathe through the rising burn in my throat.
Fourteen days.
I scrubbed my face with both hands.
I needed a job.
Except I couldn’t get a job. Not a real one. Not with training hours like mine. My schedule was built around pool time, recovery blocks, strength training, and sleep. There wasn’t an inch of space left.
But I opened my laptop anyway.
And I tried.
And just like I had thought, it was hopeless.
Search after search. Job board after job board. Half of them required experience I didn’t have. The other half required hours I couldn’t give. Nights, weekends,full-time commitments, on-site work. I couldn’t balance that with training unless I gave up sleep entirely.
Or gave up swimming.
Just the thought made my lungs constrict again.
Swimming was the only thing I was good at. The only thing I’d ever had. The only way out of the kind of life my parents had lived—scraping by, paycheck to paycheck, choosing between groceries and repairs, patching holes in the roof instead of replacing it.
I rubbed at my eyes until they stung. I remembered being a kid, lying awake at night listening to my parents whisper in the kitchen about overdue bills. Remembered pretending to be asleep so they wouldn’t know I’d heard every word. Remembered the constant pressure, quiet but heavy, of wanting to help but being too young to do anything.
Now I was grown. And somehow still useless.
I clicked out of the last job posting and leaned back, staring at the ceiling.
Maybe I should quit.
Maybe I should stop pretending I belonged anywhere near an Olympic pool.
Maybe this was the universe telling me the dream wasn’t mine to have.
My phone buzzed against the coffee table, and I reluctantly picked it up, not in the mood to talk to anyone.
