The Last Orange Hour
The vitamin bottle sat on her nightstand, a silent accusation. One a day, they promised. One a day to feel whole, to feel complete, to feel like the woman she was supposed to be at forty-two. Elena dry-swallowed it, the chalky pill catching in her throat like all the other things she couldn't say.
Her iPhone lit up the dark room. Not him. Never him anymore. Just another Slack notification from David, wanting the Q3 projections by morning. She watched the screen fade to black, a mirror that showed her everything she'd become: tired eyes, hair falling flat, a career that paid the bills but never filled the hollow space in her chest.
She laced up her running shoes — the expensive ones she'd bought three months ago when she decided to reinvent herself. Three miles a day, she'd told herself. Three miles to outrun the silence in her apartment, the dinner for one, the way her mother still asked when she'd find someone nice during their Sunday calls.
The sunset burned orange across the sky as she stepped outside, that particular bruised shade of citrus and rust that made everything feel both beautiful and dying. This was the golden hour photographers raved about. This was the hour when ordinary people transformed into something luminous, when even the cracks in the sidewalk gilded themselves in significance.
She ran past the couple on the bench, their hands tangled together, oblivious to the masterpiece light. She ran past the coffee shop where she and Mark had spent every Sunday morning for two years, until he'd moved to Chicago for someone more spontaneous, more adventurous, more not-her.
Her phone buzzed against her hip. She kept running.
The vitamin dissolution timeline said twenty minutes to absorb. She checked her watch. Seventeen more minutes until she might start feeling like herself again. Seventeen more minutes until the chemicals kicked in and did what therapy and wine and dating apps couldn't.
The orange sky deepened to purple, and somewhere behind her, the distance she'd put between the woman she was and the woman she wanted to be grew wider with every step. Tomorrow, she promised herself. Tomorrow she'd finally feel complete.
Tomorrow she'd take another vitamin.