The Regimen

Eliza counted them out every morning: the D3 for the bones that already ached at thirty-seven, the B-complex for energy she no longer felt, the Omega-3 for a heart that had been through too much. The vitamin bottles lined her bathroom counter like soldiers in a war she wasn't sure she was winning.

Her iPhone buzzed on the nightstand. Marcus again. Three missed calls, two texts, all from last night. She hadn't opened them. She wouldn't. Some messages were better left unread, like letters you burn instead of answering.

"You need to get out," Sarah had said over coffee yesterday, her phone face-down on the table, a deliberate choice that Eliza appreciated. Sarah used to be Marcus's friend first—that was the complication, the triangulation that made everything harder. "It's been six months, El."

"Six months of what?" Eliza had asked, though she knew. Six months since the hospital, since the diagnosis that wasn't cancer but might as well have been. Six months since Marcus decided he couldn't do "sick" anymore, couldn't do uncertainty. He'd packed his things inboxes while she lay in a hospital bed wondering if she'd ever feel whole again.

Now she stood in her bathroom, swallowing pills that promised wholeness but delivered only placebo certainty. The iPhone lit up again. Not Marcus this time—a work notification. The world kept moving.

She thought about Sarah, sitting across from her yesterday with those pitying eyes, and wondered: what does it mean to be a friend when someone's life becomes something you can't recognize? When their narrative diverges so sharply from your own—marriage, promotions, the predictable forward march of adult life—that you can no longer bridge the gap?

Eliza opened the Messages app. She scrolled back six months, to the last real conversation with Marcus. Before he left. Before she became the kind of person who took twelve supplements a day and learned to live with the quiet.

She typed: "I'm having dinner with Sarah on Friday. You should come."

Then she deleted it. Some gaps don't need bridging. Some lessons are learned alone, in bathrooms with tiled floors and the clinical rattle of pill bottles, learning that healing isn't about returning to who you were—but about discovering who you can become instead.

The vitamins went down dry. Outside, the morning light caught the dust motes floating in the air, and for the first time in months, Eliza didn't reach for her phone.