The Morning After

Maya stood on her balcony at 5:47 AM, vitamin D tablet in hand, watching the city bleed into dawn. Three years ago, David had called her bear—first as a joke about her hibernation-like sleep patterns, then with affection, then not at all. Now the word existed only in the WhatsApp archives of their relationship, buried under months of radio silence.

She swallowed the vitamin with lukewarm coffee, its bitterness lingering. The supplements were supposed to help with seasonal depression, her therapist insisted. But depression felt too simple a word for what hollowed her out each evening when she returned to an apartment that smelled like someone else's life.

The running shoes by the door mocked her. David had bought them for her thirtieth birthday, the weekend they'd talked about training for a marathon together. She'd worn them twice since he left—the second time being yesterday, when she'd run three miles before her lungs burned and she'd had to stop, gasping, against an oak tree in the park while strangers pretended not to notice a grown woman crying in public.

Her phone buzzed. A calendar reminder: Vitamin B complex with lunch. Another reminder to take care of a body she sometimes wished would just quit demanding maintenance.

At the office, her boss asked if she was okay.

"Just tired," Maya said, which wasn't exactly a lie. She was tired of bearing the weight of expectations, tired of running in place, tired of the performance of normalcy.

That evening, she laced up the running shoes again. This time she didn't stop at three miles. She kept going until her legs burned, until her breath came in ragged gasps, until the endorphins finally kicked in and she could almost believe that forward motion meant progress, that distance traveled equaled distance overcome. She'd bear the weight tomorrow. For tonight, this was enough.