The Deferred Prescription

The morning sunlight hit Marcus's kitchen table at exactly the same angle it had every day for twelve years. He sat there, staring at the orange plastic bottle of vitamin D supplements his doctor had prescribed three months ago. Still sealed. Still unopened.

"You're running yourself into the ground," Sarah had told him yesterday at the office. She wasn't wrong. But Sarah had also slept with their mutual boss to get her promotion, so her concern tasted like poisoned fruit.

Marcus was forty-three and had spent the last decade running a division that generated twelve million in annual revenue while generating zero joy. His father had called him at Thanksgiving, drunk again, to say that Marcus's childhood friend Tyler had died of an overdose. Marcus hadn't spoken to Tyler in fifteen years—not since Tyler had chosen art school over business school, and Marcus had chosen to stop returning his calls.

Now Tyler was dead, and Marcus was successful in all the ways that didn't matter.

He opened the vitamin bottle. The pills rattled like loose change in a tin cup. Dry and small and meaningless.

"Vitamin deficiency," Dr. Patel had said, tapping the bloodwork results. "You're not absorbing what you need. Sunlight, supplements, or both."

Marcus had nodded, bought the bottle, and set it on the counter. Because fixing a vitamin deficiency felt like admitting something was broken, and he wasn't ready for that conversation yet.

He thought about Tyler's last Instagram post—a watercolor of a sunrise in Morocco, captioned: "Finally learning to see light again." Marcus had scrolled past it. Too busy. Running to the next meeting. Running from something he couldn't name.

Now he sat at his kitchen table, forty-three years old, successful and hollow, swallowing a pill that might or might not fix what was missing inside him.

Outside, someone jogged past his window. Running.

Marcus took another vitamin. Then another.

He picked up his phone and scrolled back three years to find Tyler's number, already disconnected, and typed a message he'd never send: I'm sorry. I was running so fast I forgot to look at anything.

The sun moved across the table. He stayed there, swallowing pills until he felt something besides the weight of all the years he couldn't get back.