The Unliving

The first thing Sarah did every morning was check her iPhone. Not because she wanted to, but because her body moved on autopilot—thumb pressing the screen, eyes scanning through emails that had arrived while she slept, heart already accelerating before her feet touched the floor. She was thirty-two and felt like she'd been running a marathon that started sometime in her mid-twenties and never actually ended.

Her therapist called it burnout. Her mother called it ambition. Sarah called it being a zombie.

She'd started using the word ironically at first, making jokes about corporate America and the walking dead among friends over overpriced cocktails. But somewhere along the way, the joke had curdled into something uncomfortably close to truth. She caught herself sometimes, staring blankly at computer screens or conversation partners, consciousness flickering like a bad connection. Had she always been this hollow? Had there been a before?

The vitamins sat in a precisely organized dispenser on her kitchen counter—A, D3, B-complex, iron, omega-3. Each morning, she swallowed them with the grim determination of someone performing maintenance on a machine. Like oil changes. Like software updates. Like the systems and processes she managed at work, the ones that made her feel both powerful and entirely replaceable.

Today was Tuesday, which meant it ended with Marcus. Or began with him, depending on how you framed it. They'd been seeing each other for eight months, if you could call it that. Their relationship occurred in the gaps between everything else—between work deadlines and gym sessions and family obligations and the endless scroll of her phone. Between all the running.

"You seem tired," Marcus said later that night, his fingers tracing the line of her jaw. They were lying in his bed, the city glowing through the window like a dying ember.

"I'm not tired," she said, and realized it was true. "I'm just not entirely here."

He laughed softly, sadly. "Where are you instead?"

"Someplace where I don't have to be anything. Where I don't have to respond or perform or optimize." Where she could be dead without actually dying, she thought but didn't say.

In the kitchen, getting water, she found a single orange in a bowl on the counter. Something about its improbable brightness stopped her—the color so vivid it seemed aggressive against the muted tones of the apartment. She picked it up, feeling its weight, the slight give of the skin under her fingers. The sharp scent when she peeled it filled the small space, citrus and sunlight and something almost painfully alive.

Sarah stood in the dark kitchen, eating an orange section by section, juice running down her chin, sticky on her fingers. For the first time in months, possibly years, she wasn't running anywhere. She wasn't checking her phone, wasn't planning tomorrow's meetings, wasn't maintaining the careful architecture of her life.

She was just standing there, tasting something real.

"You okay?" Marcus asked from the doorway.

Sarah looked at the orange half in her hand, at the juice on her fingers, at this man who kept asking if she was okay even though they both knew she wasn't. She thought about the zombie she'd become, about the running that never ended, about all the vitamins in the world not being able to fix what wasn't actually a deficiency.

"I will be," she said, and for the first time, it felt like the truth rather than just something people said.