Supplemental Existence

The vitamin D sat on her desk like a small amber accusation. 4000 IU, the doctor had said, after the blood work came back showing she was essentially Photoshopping herself into existence at this point. 32 years old and her bones were already planning their early retirement.

"You're not taking them?" Marcus asked, leaning against her cubicle wall. They'd been something once—friends with benefits, friends with boundaries, friends who'd watched each other cry in office supply closets during quarterly layoffs. Now Marcus was management, and she was just grateful to still have a desk.

"I forget," she lied.

"Take your vitamin," he said, already turning away. His shirt was a bright orange that hurt her eyes, like a traffic signal telling her to stop existing in this building, in this city, in this life where everyone she'd ever cared about either left or got promoted beyond reach.

That night, walking home through the park that separated the gentrified lofts from the neighborhoods that hadn't been renamed yet, she saw it: a fox. Real, not a hashtag or an emoji. It stood at the edge of the sidewalk, watching her with eyes that held zero irony, completely unconcerned with property values or optimization metrics or whether its vitamin levels were adequate for peak performance.

The fox was just... being. Alive in a way she'd forgotten how to be.

It turned and vanished into the shadows between two buildings, and something in her chest cracked open. She sat on a bench and took the vitamin from her pocket, swallowed it dry. Not because she believed it would fix anything, but because it was the smallest possible act of caring she could make toward herself.

A week later, she put in her transfer request to the field office in a smaller city. Marcus signed it without asking why. Some friends, she realized, were seasonal. And that was okay.

The fox had been right all along: sometimes you just needed to find your own territory and stop trying to thrive in places that wanted to consume you.