Citrus and Bone

The fluorescent hum of the hospital cafeteria made everything look sickly, or maybe that was just the situation. Sarah sat across from me, peeling an orange with surgical precision, the citrus scent cutting through the antiseptic air. We hadn't spoken since the funeral—that was three years ago, but the arithmetic of grief doesn't follow calendar logic.

'I'm taking the vitamins,' she said, not looking up. 'The ones you recommended. After the diagnosis.' Her hands moved with the same practiced rhythm I remembered from college dorm rooms, from shared apartments, from the decade we'd spent being each other's person before everything went wrong.

I'd become obsessed with supplements after my mother died. Vitamin D for her bones that betrayed her, B-complex for the nervous system that failed, C for the immune system that surrendered. I'd stockpiled them like amulets against my own inevitable decay, convinced that if I just found the right combination, I could engineer immortality.

Sarah had mocked me then. 'You can't vitamin away death,' she'd said, pouring wine into mugs at 2 AM, laughing at the colorful row of bottles on my kitchen counter. But here she was, her own mortality suddenly mapped out in scans and prognosis, peeling fruit with trembling hands while I watched helpless.

'I didn't mean what I said,' she continued, finally meeting my eyes. 'About your vitamins being a phase. I should've understood that grief looks different on everyone.' She separated the orange into segments, arranged them like a sacrifice on the plastic table between us.

I wanted to tell her that the vitamins had never worked. That my mother had died anyway. That I'd thrown away the bottles two years ago when I realized I was just investing in expensive urine. But what I said was: 'They're worth a try.' Because sometimes friendship isn't about truth—it's about the grace we offer each other in the impossible rooms where we find ourselves.

She pushed half the orange toward me. The gesture was so familiar, so devastatingly ordinary, that I felt the weight of every year between us collapse into the citrus scent between us. We were twenty again, before the betrayals and the silence, before grief became the geography we inhabited alone.

'I'm scared,' she said simply.

I took the orange segment. 'I know.' Outside, snow began to fall on the city, covering everything in clean white silence, but here in this room that smelled like oranges and endings, we sat together in the messy middle of things.