The Drowning Man's Regimen

Marcus stood at the kitchen counter at 11:47 PM, organizing his daily supplements into neat little rows—vitamin D3 for the sunlight he never saw, B-complex for energy he'd stopped feeling, magnesium for muscles that hadn't truly relaxed in three years. His phone buzzed with a Slack notification from his boss in Singapore, and the glowing cable connecting his laptop to the wall seemed to pulse with accusation.

He'd been promoted six months ago to Regional Wellness Director at a company that sold corporate optimism to startups. The irony wasn't lost on him—that his job was literally wellness, while his own life was a carefully calibrated performance of functionality. His apartment overlooked the harbor, and on clear nights he watched the black water reflect the city's lights, imagining what it would feel like to just let go.

His ex-wife had left him for someone who didn't measure happiness in quarterly KPIs. "You're like a person pretending to be alive," she'd said, packing her books into boxes while he answered emails on the balcony. That was the night he'd started the vitamin regimen, as if deficiency rather than emotional bankruptcy was the problem.

Now he ran his fingers along the coaxial cable snaking across his floor, the physical tether to a world he consumed but never touched. The water below called to him—not in a suicidal way, but in the way something empty calls to something else that's also empty. Two voids recognizing each other.

Marcus swallowed the vitamins dry. Tomorrow he'd give a presentation about mindfulness and work-life balance to a room full of people who were all quietly dying inside, and they'd all nod and take notes, and the cable would keep them all connected to this beautiful, terrible machine of pretending to be fine.

The water lapped against the pilings. Somewhere, a vitamin deficiency was causing someone to feel tired. Somewhere, a cable was being cut. Somewhere, someone was actually, truly alive. Marcus turned off the lights and wondered what it would take to become that person.