Love Like a Vitamin

Mark stood at the edge of the community pool at 11 PM, chlorine stinging his nose, the water black and still as oil. He'd taken to **swimming** laps after Elena left—something about the rhythmic breathing, the muffled silence underwater, the way his body moved through resistance while his mind went beautifully blank. Six weeks now, and the lifeguard no longer bothered looking up from her phone when he slipped in.

"You're like a different person," his sister had said earlier that day, watching him down his morning **vitamin** supplements with a grim efficiency she found disturbing. "You're functioning, Mark, but you're not—you're not—"

"What? Living?" He'd snapped, though she hadn't disagreed.

That afternoon, he'd agreed to play **padel** with Jake from accounting, mostly because he'd forgotten how to say no to anything that might make him feel something. The court had been enclosed in glass, the ball ricocheting off walls with a violence that felt uncomfortably familiar. Jake had chattered about his divorce—the apartment, the custody battle, the way he'd started running half-marathons to fill the silence—and Mark had hit the ball harder each time, until his palm stung and Jake stopped talking.

Now, in the pool, Mark pushed off the wall, his arms cutting through water that felt like memory. He thought about vitamins, how you could take them every day and still feel empty. About padel, how you could play with someone for an hour and never really see them. About swimming, how you could move through something and let it move through you, simultaneously.

He surfaced, gasping, and found himself crying—really crying—for the first time since the night Elena packed her boxes. The lifeguard finally looked up.

"You okay?" she called out.

Mark treaded water for a moment, feeling the weight of everything he'd been pushing down rise to the surface. He thought about the vitamins on his counter, the padel racket in his closet, the way he'd been swimming through his own life.

"No," he said, and the word felt like breaking the surface after holding your breath too long. "But I think I'm ready to be."