The Things We Leave Behind

The vitamin bottle sat on his nightstand, untouched. Three weeks since she'd left, and David still couldn't bring himself to swallow the damn things.

"They're just vitamins, David," Sarah had said, her voice that particular exhausted tone she'd developed somewhere around year seven. "They're not going to fix what's actually wrong."

What was actually wrong was sitting on the couch in his stained underwear, watching baseball highlights at 2 AM while she slept in the guest room. What was wrong was the orange rinds left on the counter for days. The hair clogging the drain because he couldn't be bothered to clean it up. The way he'd stopped trying.

The dog, a rescued mutt named Barnaby, whined at the door. David had wanted a dog. Sarah had said, "You can barely take care of yourself, David. What makes you think you can take care of another living thing?"

She was right, of course. She usually was.

He found her baseball cap on the top shelf of the closet—the one she'd worn to every game they'd attended together, back when they still did things together. The brim was bent, the faded logo of a team that hadn't made the playoffs in a decade. He remembered how she'd look in it, hair poking out messily, laughing when he'd complain about the cold beer prices, her hand warm in his.

That was the version of her he missed. Not the exhausted woman who'd stopped believing in second chances. The one who'd still laughed at his terrible jokes.

David opened the vitamin bottle and poured them into the trash. Then he called Barnaby, grabbed the leash, and walked out the door into the bright afternoon sunlight. It was time to start trying again—or at least, to start trying something.