The Last Good Morning

The vitamin C supplements sat on her counter like a promise she kept forgetting to keep. Maya stared at them through the haze of her third cup of coffee, feeling like a zombie inhabiting her own life. Her cat, Barnaby, wound through her legs, purring with the confidence of something that had never questioned its place in the world.

"At least one of us is living their best life," she muttered, scratching behind his ears.

Her iPhone lit up with another notification from work—something about the quarterly review that had been haunting her for weeks. She ignored it, just as she'd ignored the last three calls from her mother. Instead, she reached for the hat on the hook by the door. It had been his—a beaten-up fedora he'd left behind when he walked out eight months ago. She should have thrown it away. Instead, she'd been wearing it to coffee shops, to the park, sometimes just around the apartment like some ridiculous security blanket.

"You're becoming a cliché," her sister had told her last week. "Pining after a man who was never half as invested as you were."

Maya hadn't bothered to argue. The truth was, she didn't miss him. She missed who she'd been when she'd thought she loved him. She missed the version of herself that still believed in obvious things—happy endings, straightforward love, the idea that if you just took your vitamins and showed up and tried hard enough, everything would work out.

Barnaby meowed, impatient with her melancholy. She laughed, the sound rusty in her throat. Outside, the world was waking up. People were rushing to jobs that didn't fulfill them, checking phones that promised connection but delivered dopamine hits, taking vitamins that wouldn't fix the fundamental ache of being human in a world that felt increasingly unreal.

She placed the hat on her head. It smelled faintly of his cologne and the rain they'd walked through once, years ago. Not because she was holding on, but because she was learning to let go. Slowly. Imperfectly. One coffee at a time.

"Come on, Barnaby," she said, grabbing her keys. "Let's go find something real."