The B-Complex of Goodbye

Marcus stared at the orange plastic bottle in his palm. A multivitamin complex—something about memory, heart health, and the slow erosion of vitality. He'd started taking them after Elena's diagnosis, as if swallowing a daily dose of optimism could somehow inoculate him against the same genetic roulette.

"You're going to be late," Sarah called from the bedroom. "Padel with the guys from accounting, remember?"

Right. Padel. The sport everyone in his office had suddenly embraced at thirty-eight, as if chasing a small ball around an enclosed court could reverse the metabolic slowdown that began somewhere around their tenth performance review. Marcus dry-swallowed the vitamin.

He thought about Elena. Their friendship had dissolved not with a fight, but with that terrible, quiet attrition that happens when life grows too large for the container of shared history. They'd played baseball together in college—Elena at shortstop, Marcus in right field, both convinced they'd be discovered, that the minor leagues would come calling with a contract and a future. Instead, they'd gotten spreadsheets and mortgages and the slow dawning that some dreams expire like unset Jell-O.

The last time he'd seen her was three months ago at a coffee shop. She'd looked fragile in ways he couldn't articulate—like a house where the foundation had begun to shift imperceptibly. She'd told him about the vitamins then, about how her doctor said her body was forgetting how to process certain things, how she was forgetting things herself.

"We should get coffee next week," Marcus had said, meaning to follow through.

"Next week," she'd agreed, and they'd both known they were lying.

She died two weeks later. Not from the illness everyone expected, but from a stroke while she slept—an aneurysm, sudden and absolute, like God had decided to cut to commercial.

Marcus stepped onto the padel court. The ball hit his racket with a satisfying thwack. His opponent from HR shouted something about backhand form, and Marcus couldn't remember if Elena had even liked sports, or if baseball had just been something they'd done because that's what you did in college, because you were supposed to build a resume of experiences that would eventually coalesce into a personality.

He missed the return. The ball sailed past him, into the chain link.

"You okay, man?" someone asked.

Marcus smiled, the practiced expression he used in meetings and performance reviews and dinner parties with people he didn't particularly like but needed to know. "Fine," he said. "Just thinking about an old friend."

He'd remember to call his mother later. And maybe, just maybe, he'd actually do it this time.