The Things We Keep

The vitamins lived in a glass jar on the nightstand, a colorful accusation she couldn't bring herself to throw away. Orange B-12, white D3, an assortment of pills he'd sworn would fix everything—his energy, his mood, the growing distance between them. Six months after the funeral, she still couldn't decide which was harder: losing him, or admitting their marriage had been dying long before the cancer.

She sat at his desk, something she'd avoided until today. The baseball tickets from their anniversary fell out of a book—a loss from 2017, when they'd still made an effort to pretend things were fine. He'd loved the rituals of the game: the seventh-inning stretch, the overpriced beer, the statistics he could recite like poetry. She'd tolerated it, the way she'd tolerated so much.

Her hand moved to her hair, still choppy from the impulsive cut two weeks after he died. The stylist had asked if she was sure. She wasn't sure about anything anymore, except that she needed to see someone different in the mirror.

On the desk, his phone lit up with a reminder: *Vitamin refill at CVS.*

She realized then that she'd been taking the vitamins herself—a daily communion with his memory, swallowing what he'd left behind. But as she stared at the orange plastic bottle, something shifted. The vitamins hadn't saved him. They hadn't saved their marriage. They were just pills.

She swept them into the trash—all the orange bottles, the white ones, the hopeful colors of a future that never arrived. Then she called her sister. They hadn't spoken since the funeral.

"I don't know who I am without him," she said, the truth finally spoken aloud.

"You're the woman who cut off all her hair," her sister answered gently. "That's a start."