Absence Makes the Heart

Every morning, I line up Elena's vitamins on the counter: the D3 she swore by for winter blues, the B-complex for energy, the magnesium for sleep she never got enough of. I swallow them dry, one by one, feeling like a fraud performing rituals I don't believe in for someone who's never coming back.

Three months since she walked out of our marriage and into her running club. That's where she met him—Mark, the friend I'd invited to our fourth of July party, the man who now lives in the house we picked out together.

I've started swimming at the ungodly hour she prefers, slicing through silent water at 5 AM, hoping to understand what drew her from our bed to the darkness of the pool. I've learned that water doesn't give answers. It only offers the cold clarity of your own limitations, the burning in your lungs a reminder that you can't hold your breath forever waiting for someone to surface.

Yesterday, I saw them at the padel court near our old neighborhood. Elena's laughter carried across the chain-link fence—that unrestrained sound I used to pull from her throat in private, now given freely to someone else. They played with an easy synchrony I remember possessing, once. Mark's hand rested familiarly on her lower back as they walked to their car, a Mercedes Elena had coveted since I'd known her.

He made her happy. That was the cruel discovery, worse than the betrayal itself. My absence had become her friend.

I stood outside the court fence in my running gear, sweat cooling on my skin, clutching a bottle of vitamins I'd bought to replace the ones I'd nearly finished. The pharmacist had asked if I wanted the same brand as always. I'd said yes, some habits apparently impossible to break even when everything else has shattered.

Tomorrow I'll line up the vitamins again. I'll swallow them like communion wafers, like penance, like small medicine promises I make to the empty side of the bed. Some days I think this is what moving on looks like: not forgetting, but learning to breathe around the weight of what you've lost, one vitamin, one lap, one morning at a time.