Supplements for the Living Dead

Margot stared at her reflection in the office bathroom mirror, pulling a stray gray hair from her temple. Three more had appeared since yesterday. At forty-two, she'd expected this, but the speed of it still felt like a betrayal.

"You're taking those new vitamins?" asked Sarah from the next stall, emerging with perfect eyeliner and the kind of glow that suggested eight hours of sleep or excellent genetics. "The ones that promise to reverse cellular aging?"

Margot shoved the hair into her pocket. "The B-12 complex. Doesn't seem to be helping."

"Give it time." Sarah's voice was encouraging, the same tone she used with clients who'd lost everything in market crashes. "My mother swore by vitamins after her divorce. Said they were the only thing keeping her from becoming a zombie."

The word hit Margot harder than it should have. Because that's exactly what she felt like—one of the living dead, moving through her days at the investment firm, eating the same salad at her desk, returning to her empty apartment where the plants died slowly from neglect. The vitamins were just another ritual, another false promise that something could fix what was broken inside her.

She thought about David, who'd left six months ago for someone younger, someone whose hair still held its natural color. "You're just going through the motions, Margot," he'd said, packing his books. "You're not really here."

She'd stood in the bedroom, gripping her vitamin bottle like a lifeline, unable to argue because he was right. She was already a zombie then—emotionally dead, running on fumes and morning supplements.

That evening, Margot stood in her bathroom and counted twenty gray hairs in the mirror. She opened the vitamin bottle and swallowed three pills without water. Then she called her mother for the first time in three months.

"I feel like I'm dead," she said when her mother answered.

"Oh, sweetheart." Her mother's voice was warm, alive. "That's just what happens when you forget to live. The vitamins won't fix that. Only you can."

Margot touched her hair, really looked at herself for the first time in months. Not as a collection of flaws to be fixed, but as a woman who needed to start living again, even if it scared her.