Dead Battery Walking
She swallowed the vitamin with tap water, the first intentional act of kindness she'd performed for herself all day.
Her iPhone lay on the counter, screen lighting up every thirty seconds with notifications she refused to check. Work emails. News alerts. A text from David, her ex-boyfriend of three months, asking if they could talk. She'd been staring at that particular notification for twenty minutes, thumb hovering, heart hammering against ribs that felt too fragile to contain it.
She'd become something resembling a zombie since the breakup - moving through her apartment, her office, her life with the hollow automatism of the walking dead. Friends noticed. Her boss noticed. Even her barista noticed, asking with genuine concern if she was sleeping. She wasn't, not really. Not without Ambien and wine and the blue light of her phone streaming comforting Netflix shows she'd seen a dozen times before.
The vitamin regimen had been David's idea. "You're depleted," he'd said last winter, before everything fell apart. "Your body needs what your soul isn't getting." He'd bought the premium ones - the expensive organic kind with methylated B vitamins and iron and something vague called "adrenal support." She'd kept taking them after he left because stopping felt like admitting defeat.
Her phone chimed again. Same name, same question.
"Can we meet?"
She picked up the iPhone, fingers trembling, and typed: "I can't. Not yet."
The message showed Read immediately. The typing bubbles appeared, disappeared, appeared again. Then nothing.
She stared at her reflection in the dark screen - a woman she barely recognized, eyes hollow, skin dull despite the expensive vitamins, despite the moisturizer, despite everything she did to keep herself together. But beneath that exhaustion, beneath the grief and the loneliness and the terrible hollow ache of missing someone who had already moved on, she felt something small and stubborn flickering.
She swallowed another vitamin. Dry. Just to feel something solid in her throat.
Her phone lit up one final time.
"Okay. Take care of yourself."
She set it down and walked to the window, watching the city pulse below - all those other people, all those other stories, all those other hearts beating in the darkness. Tomorrow she would try again. Tomorrow she would be something more than this walking shell of a person. But for tonight, she let herself stand there in the quiet dark, vitamin dissolving in her stomach, phone finally silent, learning how to be alone.