The Lightning That Cleaves

The morning light broke through the blinds like accusations. Maya sat at the kitchen island, staring at her iPhone where his text still glowed on the screen: *I think we need different things.*

Three years, dissolved in sixteen words.

She opened the refrigerator and stared at the container of spinach he'd bought two days ago. "For our salads," he'd said, like they were building something together. Now it was already wilting, edges turning black like something dying slowly. Just like them, really.

Her cat Juno jumped onto the counter, weaving through Maya's arms, demanding breakfast. Poor thing. Mark had never liked animals. "Too much responsibility," he'd said, the same excuse he used for everything: marriage, children, staying past 7 PM on a Tuesday.

Maya pushed the spinach aside and found his vitamin organizer—Monday through Friday, each compartment filled with his meticulous carefulness. Vitamin D for mood (ironic), B-complex for energy (he was always tired), magnesium for sleep (he slept fine, she was the one staring at the ceiling).

Outside, lightning cracked the sky open. The storm had been threatening all morning, and now it finally broke. Rain hammered against the windows like applause for her misery.

She remembered the night they met—another storm, another bar, his hand warm on her lower back as he leaned in to speak. She'd felt it then, too: that electric jolt, instantaneous and absolute. She'd thought it was fate. Turns out it was just chemistry, and like all chemistry, it eventually reached equilibrium and then decayed.

The lightning flashed again, illuminating the apartment she'd chosen, decorated, filled with objects that now felt like artifacts from a civilization she no longer understood. The spinach would rot. The vitamins would expire. The iPhone would eventually stop holding his number in her favorites.

Juno meowed, impatient.

Maya stood up, dumped the spinach into the trash, and fed the cat. She opened her vitamin bottle—just a generic multivitamin, nothing organized or optimistic about it—and swallowed one dry.

Some things, she decided, you didn't get to supplement. You just had to live through them.

The storm would pass. The lightning would strike elsewhere. She would learn to be alone again, in this apartment that was suddenly, terrifyingly hers.