Cable-Tied

Emma balanced the vitamin supplements on her tongue - Vitamin D for the darkness they lived in, B-complex for the energy she no longer felt, iron for blood that seemed to thin with each passing month. A daily ritual, like brushing teeth or pretending everything was fine.

On the couch, Mark stared at the TV screen, eyes glazed and unseeing. Three years ago, he'd proposed in this same living room, sunlight streaming through windows they'd since covered with blackout curtains to save on cooling costs. Now he was something else - not dead, but not alive either. A zombie of the man she'd loved, hollowed out by layoffs and rejection letters, by the slow erosion of hope that happens so gradually you don't notice until it's too late. He moved through rooms without really seeing them, consumed meals without tasting, spoke in monosyllables.

Their savings were gone. The antidepressants weren't working. The only thing that seemed real anymore was the coaxial cable running from the wall to the television - a physical tether that bound them both to flickering illusions of other people's lives.

"We should cut the cable," she'd said yesterday, standing in the doorway with the bill. "Save money. Maybe force ourselves to actually..."

She'd trailed off, not sure how to finish. Actually live? Actually talk?

He hadn't responded. Just kept watching. Some reality show about dreams that used to seem possible.

She swallowed the vitamins with tap water. At night, she lay beside him in their bed - two bodies, but one person was missing. She wondered if she was the zombie now, going through motions, loving a man who no longer existed in any recognizable form. She was the one still alive, wasn't she? So why did she feel more like a ghost than he did?

"Emma?" Mark's voice was raspy from disuse. "I think I'll apply for that warehouse position tomorrow."

She wanted to believe it. But as she looked at him, he was already watching television again, already retreating into the blue light, already gone.

She was already planning tomorrow's vitamin cocktail, already accepting that this was her life now - two people tethered together by a cable that neither could bear to cut, neither brave enough to finally let go.