The Endless Run

The alarm woke Maya at 4:30 AM, same as every morning. She lay next to David, listening to his breathing—steady, rhythmic, completely unconscious. She touched his shoulder and felt nothing. No spark, no warmth, just the dull recognition that this was her husband. This stranger who shared her bed.

She slipped out and went to the kitchen, swallowed her B-complex **vitamin** with a glass of **water**, then laced up her running shoes. **Running** was the only time she felt something close to real anymore—the ache in her lungs, the rhythm of her feet on pavement, the certainty that if she just kept going, she'd eventually reach somewhere else.

At mile six, her phone buzzed. Sarah. Her **friend** who'd been warning her about David for two years. "He didn't come home last night, did he?"

Maya stopped running, bent over with hands on knees. The morning air burned in her throat.

"No," she said. "He did come home. He just never really arrived."

"Maya, listen to me. You've been living with a **zombie** for three years. Emotionally, spiritually—he's already gone. You're just haunting the same house together."

She walked back home as the sun rose, thinking about the long drift of things. The conversations that had stopped meaning anything. The way David looked through her instead of at her. The vitamin bottles in the cabinet—D for bone health, magnesium for sleep, omega-3 for a heart she wasn't sure was still beating in any way that mattered.

She let herself into the house and found David in the kitchen, making coffee. He looked up.

"Good run?"

"Fine."

"I was thinking," he said, staring at the coffee dripping, **water** cycling through dark grounds, "maybe we should stop pretending."

Maya leaned against the doorframe. For the first time in three years, her heart began to beat like it meant something.