Electrolytes in the Aftermath

The cat—our cat, technically—sat on Mark's side of the bed, purring with infuriating contentment. Three weeks after he'd moved out, and Barnaby still seemed to think this was temporary. Just another business trip, just another week in Chicago.

I swallowed my morning vitamin cocktail with the sort of grim determination usually reserved for hostage negotiations. B12 for energy I didn't feel. D for bones that felt increasingly fragile. A generic multivitamin because the internet said I should.

"You're not taking care of yourself," my sister had said over coffee yesterday. Her eyes had that concerned crease between them, the one that appeared more frequently lately. "You look like shit, Elena."

I'd laughed. Because what do you say to that? I'd spent the night before at 3 AM reading Reddit threads about whether cats can sense marital dissolution. Barnaby had slept through it, blissfully unaware that his world was about to become a single-income household.

The vitamin regimen was new, a pathetic attempt to manufacture control over a body that felt like it was dissolving. As if proper supplementation could prevent what happened next.

Lightning struck the transformer down the street at exactly 7:43 PM. Not the metaphorical kind—the actual, atmospheric kind, a blinding crack that turned our street into daylight for half a second. The power died instantly, taking with it the white noise machine, the refrigerator, the illusion that everything was fine.

Barnaby yowled, a sound I'd never heard from him in five years. I found him under the bed, trembling. In the emergency flashlight's beam, his eyes reflected like polished stones. I crawled under after him, my silk pajama pajamas gathering dust, and held his shivering body against mine.

"I know," I whispered into his fur. "I know."

The strange thing was, I did know. Not the specifics, but the larger truth: everything breaks eventually. Transformers, marriages, bodies. The vitamins, the therapy, the careful preservation of Mark's side of the closet—none of it mattered.

Barnaby stopped purring, just for a moment. Then, slowly, deliberately, he began again. The vibration traveled through my chest like a second heartbeat, steady and persistent despite the darkness.

I stayed under the bed with him for an hour. When I finally emerged, covered in dust and cat hair, the power still hadn't returned. But something else had. The certain knowledge that some things—even when fractured—still generate their own light.