The Lightning in the Leaves

Mara stood before the bathroom mirror at 2:17 AM, applying concealer to the purple bruises under her eyes. She'd been living like a zombie for six months since David left, moving through her marketing job on autopilot, her soul performing a slow, quiet decay that no one else seemed to notice.

She'd tried everything to feel alive again. Therapy, journaling, a paleo diet that left her hungry and resentful. Now she was on day twelve of a new regimen: a ridiculous cocktail of supplements she'd ordered online. She swallowed the neon orange vitamin D tablet with a glass of lukewarm tap water, its chalky coating catching in her throat like a swallowed secret.

Her phone buzzed on the counter—a text from James, her coworker with whom she'd been having a desultory affair. "You up?"

She shouldn't reply. James was twenty-seven, optimistic, still believed in things like passion and destiny. He was everything she wasn't anymore. But she texted back anyway: "Can't sleep."

They met at the twenty-four-hour diner down the street. James ordered spinach and eggs; Mara watched him eat, remembering how David used to say spinach tasted like wet grass. She'd loved him then, loved how unpretentious he was, until she'd stopped loving anything at all.

"You look tired," James said, reaching for her hand across the Formica table.

"I'm always tired."

"Maybe you need more than vitamins, Mara. Maybe you need to actually feel something."

She wanted to snap at him, to say he couldn't possibly understand what it was like to wake up one day and realize your heart had simply stopped working. But then lightning split the sky outside, the diner's fluorescent lights flickered, and James squeezed her fingers, and something cracked open inside her chest—not a grand explosion but a hairline fracture, a fissure through which something entirely unfamiliar began to leak.

"You're right," she said, and for the first time in half a year, she meant it.

The storm broke as they walked to her apartment, rain slicking the pavement, thunder rumbling like a warning. She pressed James against her building's brick exterior, tasting coffee on his breath, feeling the undeniable electric current of another human being who wanted her, who saw her as something more than a ghost haunting her own life.

She wasn't fixed. The vitamins weren't magic. David wasn't coming back. But as lightning illuminated the wet street, she thought she could almost remember what it felt like to be not just alive, but glad of it.