The Last Prescription

The vitamin C bottles lined Sarah's windowsill like soldiers preparing for a battle she'd already surrendered. I'd brought them over three months ago, along with the B-complex and the iron supplements, back when I thought her exhaustion was something fixable. Back when I believed that if we just optimized her intake, she'd remember how to laugh at my terrible jokes instead of staring through me like I was ghost.

"You're fading," I'd told her then, pressing the orange bottles into her pale hands. "Let me help."

She'd nodded, that sameautomatic motion she used when her boss asked for another weekend report. That was when I realized: Sarah wasn't just tired. She was something far worse.

A zombie.

Not the movie kind with their outstretched arms and hunger for brains. Sarah's condition was infinitely more common. She showed up to work. She paid her bills. She responded to texts within hours. But somewhere between the spreadsheets and the team-building exercises, the person I'd known since college—the one who danced on tables after breakups and once drove us three hours just to see a sunset—had hollowed herself out.

I watched it happen in increments. The way she stopped pausing to pet neighborhood cats. How her once-cluttered apartment became sterile, unlivable. The conversations that narrowed to deadlines and deliverables until there was nothing left of her inside.

"Those vitamins you brought," she said last week, not looking up from her laptop. "I stopped taking them."

I knew what she meant: Why nourish a body you're only renting out?

The pills sit on her windowsill still, a testament to my naive belief that people can be saved. What I understand now, what I should have understood from the beginning, is that sometimes the hardest thing to witness isn't death—it's the moment someone decides to survive instead of live, and you have to stand there, helpless, loving them through it.