The Last Vitamin

The cat watched from the windowsill, its yellow eyes tracking Marcus as he counted out the vitamins. One for his heart, one for his joints, one for the creeping sense that he'd wasted his life.

"You're rotting," Sarah had said the night she left, her voice flat as the water glass she'd slammed onto the counter. Three years later, Marcus still rotated that sentence in his mind like a prayer. He'd tried to change. He'd bought the vitamins. He'd started jogging. He'd adopted the cat from the shelter, naming it Chance, as if having something to care for might somehow fill the hollow space in his chest.

But Chance only tolerated him, curling at the foot of his bed like a judgmental comma in the sentence of his loneliness. The cat had been Sarah's idea too.

Marcus swallowed the handful of pills dry. No water. He liked the scrape of them down his throat, a small punishment he administered daily.

The shower was leaking again. A steady drip-drip-drip that echoed through the empty apartment. Marcus had meant to call the superintendent for weeks, but what was the point? Another person in his space, another person judging the water stains spreading across the ceiling, the way he'd let everything slide.

He should have fought for her. That was the thought that kept him awake, counting the ceiling's cracks while Chance purred on his chest, the vibration the only thing that made him feel something like alive.

"I can't do this anymore," she'd said. "Not with someone who's already given up."

The vitamins sat in their orange bottle on the bathroom counter, next to her old toothbrush, which he still hadn't thrown away. Each morning, he swallowed them like a sacrament, hoping that if he could just keep his body from failing, maybe his heart would remember how to work again.

Water pooled around his ankles in the shower. He looked down at his feet, the veins mapping routes to nowhere, and thought about how he used to wake up early just to watch her sleep. How he used to believe that love was something you could hold onto, not something that slipped through your fingers like water.

Chance meowed from the other room, probably hungry. Probably wondering why the tall human was standing under the failing water again, letting it wash over him like absolution he hadn't earned.

Marcus turned off the shower. Tomorrow he'd call about the leak. Tomorrow he'd throw away the toothbrush. Tomorrow he'd stop waiting.

The cat rubbed against his leg as he stepped out, leaving wet footprints on the bathmat. For the first time in three years, Marcus bent down and ran his fingers through Chance's fur, felt the purr begin somewhere deep, like something rediscovering how to work.

"Okay," he whispered. "Okay."

The water dripped behind him, but he didn't turn back.