The Last Supplement

The vitamin C tablets sat in a neat orange pyramid on Marcus's nightstand, next to his phone and the wedding ring he'd stopped wearing three months ago. His therapist called them 'anchors,' small rituals to ground him in the midst of the divorce. But mostly, they just reminded him of how much he'd aged since he'd last felt like himself.

"You coming or what?" Jenna called from the hallway, padel racket slung over her shoulder like she'd been born holding one. She was twenty-six, with the kind of effortless confidence Marcus had possessed briefly in his thirties before life had eroded it layer by layer.

"Yeah," he said, dry-swallowing another capsule. "Let's go."

They'd been meeting like this for weeks—clandestine games at the indoor court near her apartment, the thwack of the ball against glass walls drowning out the conversations they weren't having. Marcus knew what he was: a forty-three-year-old man clinging to the last frayed edges of his youth, using someone else's vitality to patch the holes in his own. But every time he tried to end it, Jenna would look at him with those dark, knowing eyes, and he'd find himself making excuses to stay.

The game was vicious today, each hit carrying something else entirely. She was angry at him—he could tell by the way she aimed for his backhand, again and again. But she wouldn't say why, and he was too cowardly to ask.

"My mother asked about you," she said between points, bending to retrieve the ball. "She thinks you're my landlord."

Marcus missed his return. "What did you say?"

"What could I say?" She straightened up, and for the first time, he saw how tired she looked. "That you're the married man I've been seeing for six months? The one who takes vitamins for his hair and cries after sex sometimes?" Her voice cracked. "God, Marcus. I'm playing padel with a ghost."

That night, driving home through the canyon, a shape lumbered out of the darkness—massive, dark, impossible. A bear, standing on the shoulder of the road, watching him with ancient, indifferent eyes. Marcus slammed the brakes, his heart hammering.

The bear didn't move. It just watched him with the weight of something that had existed before marriages, before supplements, before humans constructed elaborate rituals to convince themselves they wouldn't die. Then it turned and vanished into the trees, and Marcus understood with sudden, terrible clarity: he wasn't holding himself together. He was just postponing the falling apart.

He pulled over to the side of the road and cried until dawn, then drove home and swept the vitamins into the trash.