The Chemistry of Absence

Elena sat at the kitchen counter, the fluorescent light humming above her like a dying insect. In front of her lay three things: a bottle of vitamin D supplements the doctor had insisted she take, an orange she'd forgotten to eat for days, and a cat carrier she hadn't used in six months.

The orange had softened, its dimpled skin yielding slightly under her thumb. She peeled it slowly, the citrus scent cutting through the stale air of her apartment—air that still smelled vaguely of Richard's cigarettes despite him being gone since September. The cat, Barnaby, had gone with him. Not because he'd wanted the creature, but because she couldn't bear the way the animal would stare at her with those accusing yellow eyes, as if her leaving the marriage had been her fault alone.

She swallowed a vitamin without water, the pill catching in her throat. The doctor had said her levels were dangerously low, that her bones would suffer, but Elena thought her bones were already hollowed out from the inside.

"Deficiency," Richard had called it, during that last terrible fight. "That's what's wrong with you. You're deficient."

The orange segments were impossibly bright against the gray counter. She ate them one by one, the juice stinging her cuticles, the sweetness almost overwhelming. Barnaby had loved oranges. He'd bat at the peeling, chase wedges across the floor, possessed by the same manic energy that had made Richard laugh until tears came.

She'd loved that about them both—the way ordinary things could suddenly become magnificent. But magnificence was exhausting to sustain.

Elena looked at the vitamin bottle again. Twelve dollars for sixty pills. The cost of pretending everything was fine, of building new bone tissue on top of old grief. She took another one, chasing it with the last of the orange, juice and pills mixing in her stomach like some alchemical experiment in transformation.

The phone rang. It was her mother, probably calling to check if she'd eaten dinner. Elena let it go to voicemail. Some hungers couldn't be satisfied with food or vitamins or explanations. Some absences were just geography now, territories she'd stopped trying to colonize.

She threw the orange peel into the trash. The cat carrier she pushed to the back of the closet. Some other time, she'd find a different animal to love. Some other life, she'd learn to want what she already had.