The Pharmacist's Aisle

The fluorescent lights of the pharmacy aisle hummed with a low-grade migraine Elena had been nursing since Tuesday. She stood before the supplements, her cart containing only a singular, withered orange that had seemed optimistic when she'd grabbed it twenty minutes ago but now looked like a small, depressed sun.

Her hair had been falling out for months—not in clumps, but in that terrifying gradual erosion that made her wonder if she was simply disappearing strand by strand. The dermatologist had prescribed vitamins, something with biotin that cost forty dollars for a bottle the size of her palm. Capitalism, she thought, reaching for the generic version.

"You look like shit," her sister had told her over coffee yesterday, and Elena had almost wept with gratitude for the honesty. Everyone else had been offering variations on "you look tired" or the worst one: "you'll feel better soon." As if grief were a cold that passed after a week.

Mark had left four months ago. Not for another woman, which would have been a cliché she could have worked with, but because he'd decided at forty-two that he needed to "find himself" in a van down by the river, literally. He was currently somewhere in Colorado, living out some midlife crisis fantasy while she paid their mortgage alone.

A woman beside her was crying silently, reading the back of a prenatal vitamin bottle. Elena wanted to say something, offer some small acknowledgment of their shared moment in this fluorescent limbo, but the words caught in her throat. What was there to say? That it gets easier? That four months later, you'd still find yourself paralyzed in the supplement aisle, unable to choose between the expensive vitamins your doctor recommended and the cheap ones that might be just as good?

At home, her cat—a judgmental calico named Bear, because Mark had found it hilarious—would be waiting. Bear had stopped eating after Mark left, then started overeating, then simply stared at Elena with what she swore was disappointment. Animals knew. They always knew.

The orange rolled in her cart as she turned toward the register, a small orange sphere in a life that felt increasingly gray. She grabbed the generic vitamins. Forty dollars could buy a lot of wine, and honestly, the wine had been doing a better job of keeping her hair on her head than any supplement.

Outside, the sunset burned through the clouds like the world's brightest bruise. For the first time in months, Elena thought about calling her sister. Not to talk about Mark or the vitamins or the crushing weight of all the small decisions that now belonged solely to her. Just to say she'd survived another day.

She would make it through this. Not today, maybe not tomorrow. But eventually. The bear of a name on her calico's tag, the orange in her bag, the vitamins in her pocket—these were small anchors. You survived on small anchors.