The Supplements We Swallow

The vitamin bottle sat on her kitchen counter, orange and white promises of better days. Maria swallowed two with lukewarm coffee, the same routine she'd followed since David left three months ago. Her iphone lit up with another work notification—something about quarterly projections and the bullshit corporate speak that filled her days like cheap filler.

"Markets are experiencing a bull run," her boss had announced in the morning meeting, his face flushed with the kind of enthusiasm only men who measured worth in stock points could muster. Maria had nodded, tucked a loose strand of hair under her baseball cap—it was game day, and the old Blue Jays cap was the only piece of her father she had left—and wondered when she'd stopped caring.

She drove to the nursing home, the hat pulled low over her eyes. Her father didn't recognize her anymore, but he still talked about baseball games from 1987, his voice cracking with memories she'd never lived. The bull in him—that stubborn, relentless force that had raised her alone—had been reduced to this: a man in a wheelchair, forgetting his own daughter's name while recounting perfect pitches from thirty years ago.

"Your mother's hat," he said, reaching out with trembling fingers. "She wore it to every game."

Maria let him touch the brim. She'd never told him she kept it because it was the only thing that still smelled like him—tobacco and old leather and the way safety was supposed to feel.

Back home, she threw the vitamins in the trash. Some things you couldn't supplement away. Some emptinesses were just spaces where things used to be, and no amount of pretending would fill them. She picked up her iphone, scrolled past the missed calls, and found herself googling something she hadn't thought about in years: how to throw a knuckleball.

Her father had taught her once, in a backyard that no longer existed. Maybe it was time to remember.