The Pyramid Scheme of Grief

Maya found the bottle of expired vitamins in Marcus's bathroom cabinet while helping his mother pack up the apartment. Six months dead and his things were already being boxed for strangers. "For energy," the label read. She swallowed one dry, standing in the empty hallway like a zombie in her own life.

She'd been running from this moment for half a year. Literally running - dawn jogs along the waterfront, lungs burning, headphones drowning out the silence that had settled when Marcus stopped calling. Their friendship had been built on thirty years of shared trauma, bad decisions, and worse haircuts. Then came his diagnosis, then the rapid decline, then the voicemail she never answered.

I'll call next week, she'd thought. She'd thought the same thing the week before. The week before that.

Now she stood in his apartment, surrounded by cardboard boxes. His mother offered her a pyramid of carefully folded t-shirts from the closet, a funeral shrine of cotton. "He talked about you," his mother said. "Always wondered why you stopped coming around."

The vitamins tasted like nothing. Like everything lately.

Maya found herself running again that evening, but this time she ran to the waterfront where they'd shared illicit joints and impossible dreams at twenty-two. She stopped at their bench - still there, still graffitied, still bearing their initials carved deep enough to have survived three decades.

Her phone buzzed. An old message from Marcus, sent six weeks before he died: *Hey. I know you're busy. Just thinking of you. Take care of yourself.*

She'd never responded. Too busy running from the inevitable, too busy being the friend who'd be there later, always later, until later became never.

The pyramid of t-shirts in the box. The vitamins for energy he'd never need. The zombie moving through the days without him. The running that couldn't outrun guilt.

Maya sat on the bench and finally let herself cry. A friend who had loved her enough to reach out while dying, and she'd been too busy to pick up the phone.

The vitamins wouldn't bring him back. But maybe they'd give her the energy to stop running.