The Morning After Everything

Mara had been running for forty-five minutes when her phone buzzed in the armband. Sarah's name. Again.

She didn't stop. The pavement blurred beneath her sneakers, the rhythm of her breath syncing with the slap of rubber on concrete. Running had become her default state since the move—the physical sensation of forward motion tricking her brain into believing she was actually going somewhere.

The orange glow of dawn was breaking over the skyline when she finally slowed to a walk, chest heaving. Three years ago, she and Sarah had watched a sunrise from this same overlook, hungover and twenty-four, holding lukewarm coffee and making plans that seemed permanent then. Sarah had worn that ridiculous orange coat she refused to replace, the one that made her look like a construction traffic cone but made Mara laugh every single time.

'You need vitamin D,' Sarah had told her during their last conversation, pressing a bottle into her hand. 'You're pale as hell.'

The bottle sat unopened on Mara's bathroom counter still, a bright orange indictment among her minimalist everything. Sarah always said vitamins were for people who refused to eat vegetables properly, but she'd bought them anyway. That was the thing about friendship—or whatever they'd been calling it by the end. The small kindnesses that felt like weapons afterward.

Her phone buzzed again. A text this time: 'I'm getting married.'

Mara sank onto a bench and pressed her palms against her eyes until she saw orange spirals behind her eyelids. The running wasn't working anymore. The motion couldn't outpace the stillness of everything she'd left unsaid.

She stood up and turned back toward the apartment. Not running now. Just walking. She'd open the vitamins. She'd respond. She'd figure out how to exist in a world where Sarah belonged to someone else.

The sun was fully up now, the sky burning brilliant and impossible orange. Some mornings, you just had to watch the light come in and let it hurt.