The Absence You Can't Supplement

The iPhone sat on the nightstand, its screen lighting up every few minutes with notifications she no longer cared to answer. Three weeks since David left, and still she checked. Old habits, she supposed, dying harder than relationships ever did.

Her running shoes waited by the door, accumulating dust. She used to run six miles every morning before dawn, the rhythmic slap of pavement against soles drowning out the existential questions that surfaced in quiet moments. Now, the mere thought of lacing up felt like climbing Everest without oxygen. grief had metastasized into physical lead, heavy and impossible to outrun.

The bathroom counter held her morning arsenal: fish oil capsules, probiotics, a multivitamin that promised energy she hadn't felt in months. She swallowed them ritualistically, this daily communion with wellness, as if optimal nutrition could compensate for the hollowness expanding inside her chest. The vitamin bottle's label claimed to support emotional well-being. The advertising executives who wrote that had never loved someone until the love curdled into resentment.

Her phone buzzed again. A text from him: I think I left my good watch in the nightstand drawer.

She stared at the message until the screen went dark, feeling the particular cruelty of mundane requests after apocalypse. He wanted his watch back. She wanted the last three years returned, unspent, so she could make different choices. Or maybe just the warning that love becomes whatever you feed it, and they had both been starving it for a long time.

The running shoes still waited. The vitamins were swallowed. The iPhone remained a portal to someone who was no longer hers. Some mornings, she thought, you just have to put on the shoes and run anyway. Not toward anything. Just forward, into whatever comes next.