The Absence of Orange

The orange plastic bottle sat on her bathroom counter, its label peeling at the corners. Vitamin D3, the doctor had prescribed. "For your bones," he'd said, not mentioning how forty years of running on concrete had taken its toll.

She swallowed the pill dry, staring at her reflection. Her father had died at forty-seven. Same liver, same tendency toward melancholy, same stubborn refusal to slow down.

Outside, Buster — her ex-husband's retriever, whom she'd kept in the divorce — scratched at the back door. He needed walking. Everything needed something from her.

They'd argued about the dog the night Michael left. "You're running from everything," he'd said, packing his suitcase. "Your mother's death. Your promotion you didn't want. The marriage you weren't present for."

She'd denied it then. But standing in her bathroom at 5 AM, preparing for another run, she couldn't anymore.

The morning air was cold, her breath visible. She ran harder than usual, her thighs burning, the rhythm familiar and punishing. This was how she processed grief — through motion, through denial, through the comforting illusion that if she moved fast enough, the past couldn't catch her.

Buster waited at home, his golden coat duller now, his hips stiffening. He was eight, the same age her marriage had been when it ended. The vitamin bottle on her counter was half empty.

"Running," her therapist had called it. "From intimacy, from vulnerability, from the very things that make life worth living."

She'd stopped running — literally — three months ago. Started yoga. Started therapy. Started taking vitamins instead of whiskey.

Now she walked Buster slowly, letting him sniff every tree, watching the sunrise paint the sky in shades of pink and gold. Some mornings, she even cried. That was progress, she supposed.

The orange bottle sat on her counter. Vitamin D3, for bones that had carried her through marathons and heartbreak, through births and deaths, through the long road from running toward to being with.

She swallowed another pill. Buster's tail thumped against the cabinet.

She was still learning how to stay.