The Supplement of Lost Things

Mark stood before the bathroom mirror, tweezing another gray hair from his temple. Each pluck felt like a small victory against time, though he knew the war was already lost. At 42, he'd become a collector of small defeats.

"You're taking that again?" Elena asked from the doorway, her voice flat. She held her coffee mug with both hands, as if needing the warmth.

"It's a vitamin D complex," Mark said, not turning around. "Doctor said my levels were low."

"You've got a whole pharmacy in there, Mark. Vitamin this, supplement that. You think any of it's going to matter?"

He finally faced her. Elena was still beautiful, even with the dark circles under her eyes, even with the way she'd stopped wearing makeup to work six months ago. What hurt was that she didn't seem to care anymore—not about her appearance, not about their anniversary dinner next week, possibly not about him.

"I'm trying," he said quietly.

"We're all trying," she replied, turning away. "Some of us are just tired of pretending that another pill is going to fix what's actually wrong."

That evening, Mark watched her from across the dinner table. Elena moved through the meal mechanically, cutting her chicken, taking bites, chewing, swallowing. The word came to him unbidden: zombie. Not the movie kind with rotting flesh and outstretched arms, but something far more terrifying—someone still alive in the clinical sense, yet hollowed out by the slow erosion of hope and passion and the thousand tiny disappointments that accumulate over twelve years of marriage.

He thought about the vitamins again. The absurdity of trying to optimize a body when the soul inside had already begun to decompose.

"Remember when we used to dance?" he asked suddenly.

Elena's fork paused halfway to her mouth. After a long moment, she set it down. "I remember a lot of things, Mark. I remember the way you used to look at me like I was the only person in the room. I remember when you'd come home from work actually excited to tell me about your day. Now you come home and obsess over your hair in the mirror and sort through your pills like they're going to save you."

"I'm scared," he admitted, the words catching in his throat. "I'm scared of getting old, I'm scared of losing you, I'm scared that this—that us—is already gone and neither of us wants to be the one to say it out loud."

Elena studied him for a long time. Then she stood up and walked around the table. She ran her fingers through his hair, the gray strands mixing with the brown.

"I'm still here," she said. "But I can't be the only one who remembers how to be alive."

That night, Mark left the vitamins on the counter and took Elena dancing at a dive bar where no one knew them, where for an hour they were neither old nor young, neither dead nor alive, but simply two bodies moving to music, pretending that pretending might still be enough.