The Shoreline of Us

The sun was dying behind the palms when Maya's iPhone buzzed for the third time in five minutes. She didn't look at it. Neither did I. We hadn't spoken since breakfast, our silence thickening like curdling milk.

A baseball game flickered on the resort's outdoor TV—bottom of the ninth, two outs, the kind of moment that used to make me grab her hand and squeeze. Now my palm stayed curled around my sweating drink, alone.

"You're taking those vitamins?" she asked suddenly, not looking at me. The question felt like accusation.

"Every morning. Like you said."

She nodded, staring at the ocean. "Good. That's good."

The vitamins were her idea—D3 for mood, B12 for energy, magnesium for sleep. A regimen to fix what twelve years together had broken, as if our marriage were a nutritional deficiency instead of a slow extinction. I took them religiously, this daily sacrament of hope.

But underneath, I felt like a zombie going through the motions of living. Wake, work, swallow pills, sleep. The things that once made me human—her laugh, her hand finding mine in the dark, the way she'd-rest her head on my shoulder during movies—had rotted away, leaving this shuffling thing that wore my face.

A cheer went up from the bar. Someone had hit a home run.

"Remember our first game?" I asked. "Cubs versus Cardinals. Bleacher seats. You wore that vintage cap."

Maya turned then, really looked at me. Her iPhone lit up again—Craig from marketing, probably, or whatever his name was. I didn't care anymore.

"I remember everything," she said softly, and there it was: the exhaustion, the grief, the decade of love that had curdled into resentment. "That's the problem, isn't it?"

My palm found hers across the table. Her fingers were cold.

"We could start over," I said, knowing even as the words left my mouth that some things can't be fixed with vitamins or second chances.

She squeezed my hand—once, briefly—then let go. "No. We can't."

The palms swayed in the wind as the sun finally disappeared, and somewhere in the distance, that baseball game ended with people who didn't know how lucky they were to still care about the outcome.