The Distance Between Screens

The vitamin bottle sat on Maya's counter like a silent accusation. Vitamin D — the sunshine vitamin, they called it. She hadn't seen real sunshine in three days, not since the message from Sarah.

Maya laced her running shoes, her phone already syncing to her bluetooth headphones. The iphone had been her lifeline during the pandemic, her window to humanity when humanity felt dangerous. Now it felt like a cage.

She'd been running every morning since she turned thirty-five. Doctor's orders, stress management, whatever you wanted to call it. Three miles through the neighborhood, past the same houses, the same lives. The Hawthornes' manicured lawn. The orphaned bike at the corner of Elm. The Victorian with the peeling paint that everyone said was haunted but was probably just neglected.

Sarah had been her best friend since sophomore year of college. Twenty-three years of shared apartments, shared secrets, shared trauma. Then came the miscarriage that Maya couldn't talk about and the promotion Sarah couldn't celebrate, and somewhere in all that careful silence, they'd drifted.

The iphone buzzed in her pocket — a notification, probably another reminder to take her vitamins. Another artificial connection in a disconnected life.

Maya's feet hit the pavement in rhythm, her breath misting in the autumn air. She was running toward something, or maybe away from something. The distinction blurred lately.

Her therapist asked if she'd reached out. Maya said no. What was there to say? "I'm sorry I couldn't be happy for you when you got the partnership because I was too busy being hollowed out by grief"?

The vitamin D was supposed to help with mood regulation. Some things couldn't be regulated.

As she rounded the corner toward home, Maya's phone chimed. A text. Sarah's name appeared on the lock screen, glowing against the morning darkness.

"Coffee? Tomorrow?"

Maya stopped running. Her heart pounded for reasons unrelated to exercise. She typed back with shaking fingers, "Yes."

Some connections, she realized, don't break. They just wait. Like vitamins stored in the body, dormant but present, waiting for the moment they're needed again.