Chlorine & Supplements

The fluorescent lights of the pool at 5 AM cast everything in a sickly blue-gray. Sarah counted her laps—one, two, three—her body cutting through water that still smelled of chlorine from the night before. She'd been swimming every morning since David disappeared, though she wasn't sure if it was penance or preparation.

"You're still taking those?" David had asked two months ago, gesturing to the orange prescription bottle on her kitchen counter. The vitamin D supplements—a doctor's recommendation after she'd mentioned feeling perpetually tired, perpetually gray. "You know that's not going to fix what's actually wrong."

He'd meant the divorce. Or maybe the job she'd stopped caring about a decade ago. Or perhaps the way she moved through her life like a ghost haunting her own apartment. David had always seen too much.

They weren't sleeping together—God, she wished they had been, would've made it simpler. Instead they existed in that terrible adult space where you're not quite lovers but you're certainly not just friends, this liminal territory where every conversation carries the weight of what you're not saying. He'd come over on Tuesdays. They'd drink wine and talk about everything except the fact that they were both lonely enough to keep showing up.

The last Tuesday, he'd asked about the vitamins again. "You think if you take enough of them, you'll start wanting to be alive again?"

She'd thrown the bottle at him. Not hard. Just a gentle toss that he caught easily, his fingers closing around plastic like they closed around everything in her life—patient, waiting, infuriatingly present.

That was the night he told her he was moving to Seattle. A job offer. A fresh start. A chance to stop being the person who showed up at her apartment every Tuesday to drink wine and talk about nothing.

Sarah reached the pool wall, gasping. The lifeguard—a college kid who looked like he should still be asleep—nodded at her respectfully. She turned for another lap.

David's flight left at 7 AM. She'd checked. She'd almost gone to the airport, but that was the kind of thing people did in movies. Real life was subtler. Real life was swimming laps in a cold pool at 5 AM, waiting to see if you'd feel something other than this hollow ache where your liver should be.

She thought about the vitamins at home in their orange bottle. David was right—they wouldn't fix anything. But they were something to swallow. Something to do when the alternative was admitting that sometimes you didn't want to be fixed, you just wanted someone to sit in the gray with you.

Sarah surfaced, inhaling sharply. Chlorine and early morning and the terrible certainty that she'd never see him again. The vitamins could wait. The swimming could continue. Some things you just had to keep doing until they made sense, or until they stopped hurting quite so much.

She kicked off the wall, one more lap toward nowhere.