The Space Between

The fertility specialist prescribed the **vitamin** supplements with the same detached efficiency she'd used to deliver the news about my low reserve. "Take these," she'd said, sliding the prescription across her desk like it might somehow compensate for what my body refused to do. "Sometimes it helps. Sometimes it doesn't."

Now I sit on the bathroom counter at 2 AM, staring at the orange plastic bottle while Marcus sleeps in the next room. He hasn't touched me since the second miscarriage—not out of cruelty, but out of some careful avoidance, like I'm made of **lightning** that might strike if he gets too close. His tenderness has become so precise it feels surgical.

Barnaby, our elderly **goldfish**, circles his bowl in the corner, his orange scales catching the moonlight. We got him as a practice run, people said. A low-stakes way to learn responsibility before the real thing. But Barnaby has outlasted three pregnancies and most of our marriage. Sometimes I watch him swimming alone in his filtered world and think: at least he doesn't know he's trapped.

My **hair** started falling out three months ago—not in clumps, just enough that I notice it gathering in the drain, in my brush, on Marcus's pillow. He pretends not to see. He pretends a lot of things lately.

Emma, my sister, suggested we get a **dog**. Something to nurture, she said, something that would love us unconditionally. But we both know what she really meant: something alive that wouldn't die inside me. Marcus almost agreed. I saw it in his eyes—that desperate willingness to try anything, fill any void, with any living thing that might stay.

Instead I sit here counting pills that promise to fix what can't be fixed, watching a fish who doesn't know he's lonely, listening to the man who used to hold me breathe in his sleep. The space between us has grown so vast I'm not sure how we'd bridge it even if we tried.

I open the vitamin bottle. The capsules clink against each other like tiny promises I'm tired of making. Outside, thunder rumbles in the distance, and somewhere between the storm and the silence, I understand: some things can't be supplemented, only endured.

I swallow one pill dry. Then I go back to bed, curling around the emptiness between us, and wait for whatever comes next.