Bearing Witness

Elena stood in the supplement aisle of CVS at 11:47 PM on a Tuesday, clutching a bottle of Vitamin D3 like it might actually fix something. Her divorce had been final for three months, and her therapist insisted the supplements would help with the winter darkness settling into her bones.

Outside, lightning fractured the sky, illuminating the fluorescent-lit emptiness of the store. She'd spent fifteen years married to a man who'd left her for his twenty-six-year-old assistant. Now she was forty-two, alone, and buying vitamins in the middle of the night because she couldn't sleep.

The clerk at the counter — a kid with ear gauges and tired eyes — asked if she'd found everything okay. His name tag read 'Bear'. Not his real name, obviously, but she wondered if anyone actually called him that, or if it was just one of those things people accepted without question, like her marriage had been.

"Yeah," she said, sliding the bottle across the counter. "Just this."

"Rough night?" He asked it not with pity but with the practiced indifference of someone who'd seen too many people buying condoms at 3 AM or pregnancy tests alone.

Lightning struck again, closer this time. The overhead lights flickered.

"Could say that," Elena said, and found herself telling him about the divorce, about the vitamins her therapist swore by, about the way her ex-husband had told her he'd fallen out of love somewhere around year twelve, but he'd borne it because he didn't believe in quitting.

Bear nodded as he scanned her vitamin. "My parents split when I was twenty-three. Mom said she'd stayed twenty years too long. Said she'd forgotten who she was supposed to be."

The thunder shook the building's foundation.

"Did she figure it out?" Elena asked.

"She died two years later," Bear said, tapping the screen to complete the transaction. "Pancreatic cancer. But she left my dad first, so I guess that counted for something."

Elena paid, suddenly aware that she was having a moment with a stranger in a CVS during a thunderstorm, that this was what her life had become — these small, electric connections with people she'd never see again.

"Take the vitamins," Bear said, handing her the bag. "But maybe also get a dog. Or leave town. Something that scares you a little."

She walked to her car as the sky opened up. The rain felt like something she hadn't felt in years — real, tangible, hers alone. She sat in the driver's seat and took one vitamin with a sip of lukewarm water from a bottle rolling around on the floorboard.

The lightning flashed again, and in that brief illumination, she caught her own reflection in the rearview mirror — eyes wide, alive, terrified. She started the car and drove away from the apartment she still shared with his ghost, not knowing where she was going, just knowing she couldn't bear to stay.