Supplements and Storms

The vitamins sat in his palm every morning - a colorful cocktail of promises he'd started taking when Sarah left. Vitamin D for the depression his doctor insisted was seasonal. B-complex for energy he never actually felt. Multivitamins for a life he couldn't quite piece back together.

Three months now. The dog, Buster, still waited by the door on Tuesday evenings. That had been their night - cheap baseball games at the minor league stadium, draft beer, Sarah's hand warm in his even during the chilly October games. She loved baseball. Or maybe she'd just loved loving baseball with him.

The lightning strike came not as weather but as a text at 2 AM: "I'm getting married." To the man she'd left him for. The man whose name she'd whispered during sex that final month, the one whose cologne still lingered on her scarves like an accusation.

He drove to the beach house anyway.

Her key still worked. The single orange sat in the fruit bowl, exactly where she'd left it three months ago, now a shriveled tribute to something that had once been vibrant. Buster's leash hung by the door. Sarah's baseball cap from their first date was on the hook.

He stood on the deck watching the sunset paint the water orange, exactly as they had countless times before. That was the thing about endings - they didn't feel dramatic. They felt like forgetting to refill a prescription. Like a piece of fruit slowly rotting on a counter. Like the way her name still felt natural on his tongue.

Lightning cracked across the horizon, illuminating everything for that stark, brilliant second - the empty deck, the ocean stretching toward nothing, his own solitude.

Buster pressed against his leg, whining softly. The dog had always known, even before he did. Even back when she was already gone in every way that mattered, still sitting beside him at baseball games, still sleeping in their bed, already inhabiting a future he couldn't see.

He swallowed the vitamins without water. If there was a pill for this, for the way lightning still reminded him of her smile, for the way he still measured seasons by baseball games they'd never attend again - he would've taken it. He would've taken them all.

The storm broke as he drove home, rain blurring the windshield until everything looked the way he felt - indistinct, washed out, heading nowhere in particular.