Terminal Vitamin

The doctor's office smelled like antiseptic and wasted time. Dr. Patel looked at her chart, then at me, then back at the chart, as if the numbers might rearrange themselves into something less depressing.

"Severe vitamin D deficiency," she said, pushing a paper across the desk. "Practically skeletal levels. When was the last time you saw actual sunlight?"

I thought about my corner office on the forty-second floor, the fluorescent hum that had become my soundtrack for twelve years. "I eat oranges," I offered weakly.

She prescribed supplements and something about lifestyle changes, but I was already gone, mentally drafting my resignation letter again—the one I'd written and deleted forty-seven times.

That evening, I sat on my balcony with a glass of wine and my cat, Gatsby, who regarded me with the imperious judgment only cats can muster. He'd been with me through the divorce, the promotion I didn't want, the slow erosion of whatever dreams I'd once harbored.

"You're full of bull, you know that?" I told him. He blinked slowly, unimpressed.

My brother called at 9 PM, drunk again. "Remember when we were kids? Dad always said you were stubborn as a bull, Helen. He meant it as a compliment."

"Dad called everything bull, Marcus. Usually when he was wrong."

"You should come home. Mom's been asking—"

"Mom's been asking since 2019. I'm not moving back to Ohio to run her antique store."

Then lightning struck—a metaphorical one, though real thunder cracked somewhere distant. The phone conversation devolved into the same circular argument we'd had a hundred times. But as Marcus ranted about my corporate soul-selling, I looked at Gatsby, who'd discovered a moth near the balcony railing, crouching with that predatory stillness.

And suddenly it wasn't about vitamin D or corporate ladders or the suffocating weight of expectations. It was about how I'd been crouching for decades, waiting for something to chase, while the actual moments of my life—the sunlight I never absorbed, the conversations I half-listened to, the cat who loved me despite everything—slipped past like shadows.

"I'll visit," I said, cutting Marcus off. "Next month. Not for Mom. For me."

Gatsby abandoned his moth and jumped onto my lap, purring like a small engine. The wine was warm, my body was slowly starved of light, and somewhere inside me, something finally cracked open.

"Well," I told the cat, "at least we're still here."

He purred harder, because cats always know the truth before we do.