Poolside Vitamins

The papaya sat on the white tablecloth like an uninvited guest, its flesh the color of a bruised sunset. Elena had ordered it because the menu promised 'exotic wellness,' but now the fruit stared back at her, mocking the very concept. At forty-three, she'd discovered that wellness was mostly just expensive anxiety dressed in spa robes.

She was at the resort alone—Marcus had canceled three days before the trip, citing an emergency at the startup. Their startup. The emergency was named Jessica, twenty-six, and apparently very good at pivot tables.

"Your vitamin shot, madam."

The waiter placed a tiny glass of neon liquid beside her papaya. Elena picked it up, swirled it. Vitamin B12 with ginger and something the menu called 'adaptogenic mushrooms.' She'd been taking vitamins since her thirties, a small daily admission that her body was slowly betraying her, that time was a theft in progress, and that the best she could do was pay ransom in supplement form.

She'd come to the pool to read, to meditate, to somehow rise above the heartache that felt less like a broken heart and more like a hollowed-out cavity where something essential used to be. But the pool was full of couples—the way one woman tilted her head back to laugh, the way a man's hand rested proprietarily on another's lower back. Each gesture was a small knife.

A splash erupted from the deep end. A child had jumped in, fully clothed, while his mother screamed from a lounge chair. The boy surfaced, grinning, water streaming from hair that needed cutting. The mother's panic dissolved into something like exhausted affection as she waded in to retrieve him.

Elena watched them, thinking about the vitamins she'd started taking after her miscarriage six years ago. Folic acid, iron, vitamin D—as if some combination of chemicals could prepare her body for what it had failed to do, could make her ready, could fix whatever was broken inside.

She took the vitamin shot in one swallow. It burned going down.

The papaya remained untouched. Eventually, she would eat it. Eventually, she would check her phone and find no messages from Marcus, or maybe one—something careful, something cowardly. Eventually, she would go back to her life, rearranged again by someone else's choices.

But for now, there was only the pool, the papaya, the familiar ritual of swallowing something that promised to make her whole again.