Chlorine and Empty Shelves

The pool at the apartment complex had been drained for winter, leaving nothing but a blue abyss that collected leaves and loneliness. Maya stood at the edge, clutching her phone like it might suddenly deliver meaning. Her running shoes, still muddy from the morning's futile attempt to outrun thirty-nine, sat by the door.

'I'm not coming back,' David's message had said. Three years reduced to a sentence without a comma.

They'd met in a vitamin aisle of all places — both reaching for the same bottle of D3, laughing about the absurdity of seeking eternal life in supplement form. Now the grocery store felt like a minefield of memory. She'd started ordering groceries online, but somehow the app always suggested the same brand of orange juice he'd drunk straight from the carton, the one that drove her crazy.

The bear incident had been the beginning of the end, really. They'd been camping in Montana when a mother bear wandered through their campsite at dawn. David had grabbed the camera. Maya had grabbed the bear spray. Later, over coffee, they couldn't agree on who had reacted appropriately.

'It was a teaching moment,' he'd said. 'Nature deserves our wonder.'

'It was a predator,' she'd countered. 'It deserved our respect and distance.'

Now she wondered if he'd been right about everything — about her cynicism, her tendency to expect claws where there might only been curiosity. The running had started after the fight. She'd logged four hundred miles in six months, her knees aching, her heart rate monitor showing her that even at her most exhausted, she was still alive.

Maya's phone buzzed. A reminder: 'Take Vitamin D.' The app didn't know that the bottle in the bathroom cabinet had expired three weeks ago, just like everything else.

'Well,' she said aloud to the empty pool, the words falling into the blue void like stones. 'At least I still have my health.'

The joke landed hollowly, bouncing off the concrete, and somewhere deep in her chest, something finally broke open.