The Unplugging

Margot left the **vitamin** D supplement on the counter again, next to a note that read: *You haven't seen the sun in three weeks.* Marcus swallowed it dry, like he swallowed everything else—without tasting, without feeling.

At forty-seven, Marcus had become something that walked and spoke and attended quarterly reviews but was no longer quite human. A **zombie** of the corporate variety, animated by coffee and the terrifying momentum of a mortgage that refused to pause. He'd stopped noticing the color of the sky. Stopped noticing Margot's silence, which had grown from a quiet thing to something that occupied physical space in their bedroom, between his side of the bed and hers.

The **cable** guy had come yesterday—again. Another service interruption, another afternoon waiting. Marcus had watched the technician crouched behind their television, a younger man with grease under his fingernails who hummed along to the silence Marcus couldn't seem to break.

"You know," the guy had said, not looking up from the tangle of coaxial and fiber, "my dad cancelled his cable last year. Said he woke up one day and realized he'd watched four thousand hours of television and couldn't remember a single minute of it."

Marcus had stood in his own living room, surrounded by things he'd acquired to fill a life he'd stopped actually living, and felt something shift inside him. Some small, hard thing that had been calcifying for years.

That night, he didn't turn on the news. Didn't open his laptop. Instead, he found Margot in the garden, deadheading roses she'd planted when they still believed in forever.

"I don't want to be this anymore," he said, and his voice cracked like something unused.

She didn't turn around. "I know, Marcus. I've been waiting for you to notice."

The next morning, he called and cancelled the cable. Then he called in sick for the first time in twelve years. He stood in the kitchen, sunlight falling through the window onto the counter where the vitamin bottle sat, and finally, finally, he began to remember what it was to be alive.