The Vitamin Counter

Marcus stood before the bathroom mirror at 2 AM, counting out his evening vitamin regimen. One for heart health, one for joints, one for that creeping sense of mortality that no pharmaceutical company had yet managed to bottle. At forty-seven, he'd become a connoisseur of his own decay.

Three hours earlier, he'd told Sarah about the padel tournament. She'd stared at him over her steamed broccoli, eyes narrowing with that particular brand of suspicion she reserved for his midlife diversions. 'Since when do you play padel?'

'Since the baseball league folded,' he'd said, which wasn't exactly a lie. The league had folded twenty years ago, back when his knees still tolerated the crouch behind home plate, back when he still believed in the calculus of athletic heroics.

Now he ran three times a week—treadmill, climate-controlled, safe—while Sarah sold vitamin supplements to women who'd convinced themselves that wellness was a purchase away. She called herself an entrepreneur. He called it pyramid schemes for the anxious middle class. They didn't say these things aloud anymore.

The bull of a managing partner at his firm had nicknamed him 'The Vitamin Counter' after catching Marcus popping pills during a deposition. 'What's this one do, Marcus? Cure moral ambiguity?' The whole office had laughed. Marcus had laughed too, pocketing the omega-3 capsule with trembling hands.

At the padel club on Tuesdays, he played against men his age, all of them pretending that this wasn't what their lives had become: enclosed courts, softer balls, games ending before exhaustion could claim them completely. Last week, Diego had collapsed mid-rally, clutching his chest. They'd all assumed it was dramatic flair until the ambulance arrived.

Marcus swallowed his vitamins. The clock ticked toward 2:15, that witching hour when the night feels endless and the dawn impossible. In the bedroom, Sarah breathed in the rhythm of genuine sleep, that trustful unconsciousness he'd lost somewhere around his forty-fifth birthday.

He thought about the running shoes by the door, how he could lace them up right now and just go, keep running until the pavement ran out, until the vitamins ran out, until the man he used to be caught up with whoever it was he'd become.

Instead, he turned out the bathroom light. In the darkness, he could almost convince himself that tomorrow would be different. That was the vitamin he couldn't buy: the one that let you believe in beginnings again.