The Lightning Storm's Edge

The vitamin bottle sat on my nightstand for three months before I finally opened it. That was the morning Marcus called to say he was moving to Seattle. Not visiting — moving. A permanent relocation, three thousand miles away, because his wife had received an offer she couldn't refuse.

I stood at my window watching lightning stitch the sky apart, each flash illuminating the empty water glass I'd been meaning to refill since Tuesday. My therapist would call this avoidance behavior. I called it being forty-three and tired.

"You'll visit," Marcus had said, his voice tinny through the phone. "And besides, it's not like we won't talk every day."

But we both knew that was a lie. People don't really visit, not across oceans, not when careers and mortgages and aging parents press in from all sides. We'd already stopped seeing each other weekly. Now it was monthly. Soon it would be holiday cards and birthday texts and carefully curated life updates, stripped of all the raw, ugly, beautiful mess that made us friends in the first place.

My cat, Eleanor, wound around my ankles, demanding breakfast. She was Marcus's anniversary gift from three years ago, after his divorce. "She needs a home," he'd said, "and you need someone to talk to who won't try to fix you."

I scooped food into her bowl, watching rain begin to fall — that strange, hesitant rain that comes after lightning, when the air still tastes of ozone and possibility. The water glass remained empty. The vitamins remained unswallowed.

Some things, I realized, you don't consume. You don't digest them and make them part of you. You just hold them in your mouth, tasting them, until they dissolve or you spit them out. Friendship, perhaps, was never meant to be permanent. Maybe it was just lightning — bright, transformative, and fundamentally fleeting. Maybe the real skill wasn't keeping people forever, but learning to stand in the storm without closing your eyes.

I took the vitamin. Drank the water. Watched the rain fall harder.

"We'll see," I whispered to Eleanor, and meant: I love you, and this hurts, and that's exactly how it should be.