Life Support

The vitamin bottle sat on her nightstand for three months before she finally opened it. "For immune system health," the label promised, as if her immune system was the problem. As if anything about her body was the problem.

"You're walking around like a zombie," her sister had said during their last phone call, and Maya hadn't been able to argue. She'd felt hollowed out since the layoff—five months of declining health insurance, dwindling savings, and increasingly desperate job applications. The zombie metaphor wasn't far off. She moved through her apartment like it was a graveyard, each day a headstone marking another failure.

The coaxial cable had been loose in the wall since she moved in, a snake that refused to connect. Every few days, her internet would die, and she'd have to reach behind the dresser and wiggle it back to life. The whole procedure took three minutes, but those three minutes felt like the only thing she had any control over anymore. Cable goes out. Maya fixes cable. Small victory.

Tonight, she stared at the orange bottle in the dim light of her phone screen. Another rejection email sat in her inbox—"we regret to inform you"—and something inside her finally cracked open. Not the numbness. Something else.

She took two vitamins. Dry swallow, no water.

Then she crawled behind the dresser and disconnected the cable entirely.

The apartment went quiet without the hum of the router, without the endless scroll of job boards, without the comparison to everyone else's seemingly perfect lives on social media. She sat in the silence and felt something shift in her chest. Not hope. Not yet. Something more fundamental—the recognition that she was still here, still alive, even if she'd been walking through her days like the undead.

Her phone buzzed with another notification. She didn't check it.

Instead, Maya lay on the floor and watched the ceiling fan rotate, counting each revolution until her eyes grew heavy. For the first time in months, she slept through the night.

The vitamins wouldn't fix everything. The cable could be reconnected tomorrow. The zombie state would probably return. But tonight, in the quiet, she remembered how to be human again.