The Green Prescription

Margaret arranged the **vitamin** supplements on her kitchen counter with military precision. D-3 for the darkness that lived in her bones. B-complex for the energy she'd misplaced somewhere between her divorce and her forty-fifth birthday. Iron for blood that felt too thin, too weary to sustain anyone's expectations.

Her therapist called it 'self-care.' Margaret called it damage control.

The **spinach** salad she'd prepared sat wilting on the table, its once-vibrant leaves now curling like her mother's hands—arthritic, ancient, reaching across the dinner table. Margaret had bought the fresh spinach because the health article promised it would help with focus, with clarity, with the fog that had settled over her brain since Richard left. But clarity had proven expensive. Three dollars for organic greens that tasted like disappointment and resignation.

"You're trying too hard," Sarah had said during their failed attempt at friendship last week. Sarah, with her bright **orange** scarf and her new relationship and her infuriating wisdom. "You can't vitamin your way out of grief, Mags."

Margaret had wanted to slap her. Instead, she'd ordered another glass of wine and listed all the ways Richard had been wrong for her anyway. The details didn't matter anymore. What mattered was that he was gone, and she was alone in a apartment that refused to feel like hers, surrounded by half-eaten spinach and vitamin bottles that mocked her with their promises of renewal.

The black fedora sat on its shelf—Richard's hat. He'd forgotten it in the breakup, leaving it behind like an unwanted pet. Margaret should have thrown it out, donated it, burned it in the backyard. But she kept it there, a dark ghost among her sun dresses and work blouses. Sometimes, late at night, she'd touch its worn brim and remember how he'd looked in it, jaunty and confident, so sure of his place in the world. So sure he could do better.

The woman in the mirror looked tired. Margaret reached for the vitamin bottles again, her fingers trembling slightly. One more day. One more dose of optimism in gelatin capsule form. Because what else was there?

She swallowed them dry. The spinach went into the trash. The orange scarf stayed in her memory. And the hat remained on its shelf, waiting for a decision she wasn't ready to make.

Tomorrow, she told herself. Tomorrow she'd start living for real.

Tomorrow always felt more possible after the vitamins.