Citrus and Silence

The fluorescent lights of the CVS pharmacy hummed at 2 AM, that familiar headache-inducing frequency that seemed designed for people like me — the ones who couldn't sleep, the ones whose lives had quietly unraveled while the rest of the world dreamed.

I stood in the supplement aisle, staring at bottles of vitamin D like they held answers to questions I hadn't yet articulated. The label promised immunity, strength, wellness — all things I'd apparently lost somewhere between May and November, between "we should try couples counseling" and "I've been seeing someone from work."

My iPhone buzzed in my pocket. Not him — he'd stopped texting three weeks ago. Just a notification from a meditation app I'd downloaded in a fit of post-breakup self-improvement. "Breathe," it urged. "You're exactly where you need to be."

I laughed, the sound hollow and too loud in the empty store. Exactly where I needed to be: twenty-eight years old, buying gummy vitamins and avoiding the mirror, while my ex was probably currently avoiding my texts from some bed that wasn't ours.

A woman in her sixties pushed a cart past me, giving me that look — half concern, half recognition. She'd probably been here too, once. We all bear it, don't we? The hollowed-out feeling, the way your own apartment becomes unfamiliar territory, how the grocery store becomes an obstacle course of memories: his favorite orange juice, that brand of coffee he drank black, the aisle where we'd fought about something meaningless that meant everything.

I adjusted my hat — his beanie, actually, a gray wool thing I'd "borrowed" in October and never returned. Theft by abandonment. At the register, the teenage clerk didn't ask why I was buying vitamins, a pint of orange sherbet, and a pack of cigarettes at 2 AM. Some transactions don't require explanation.

Outside, the streetlights painted everything an uneasy yellow. I sat on the curb and ate the sherbet with my fingers, watching my phone screen illuminate with another notification I didn't read. Some mornings you just have to bear witness to your own small destructions, let them melt on your tongue like artificial sweetness, and wait for the sun to come up anyway.