The Vitamin D Deficiency of David Chen

The iPhone lit up David's face at 3:14 AM, another notification from her. He shouldn't have looked. He really shouldn't have looked. But there it was—a simple 'thinking of you' that felt more like a knife than comfort.

He rolled over in his queen-sized bed, now suddenly too large for one person, and fumbled for the vitamin bottle on his nightstand. Vitamin D, the doctor had said. You don't get enough sunlight working those fourteen-hour days. He dry-swallowed two pills, wondering if loneliness had a recommended daily allowance too.

The baseball sat on his dresser, gathering dust—a signed ball from the game where they'd first met. Three years ago at a Dodgers game, Section 312, when she'd accidentally spilled her soda on his lap. He'd made a joke about citrus stains, she'd laughed with her whole body, head thrown back, orange soda drying sticky on both of them. That laugh used to be the best part of his day. Now it played on a loop in his head like a cassette tape stuck on repeat.

His phone buzzed again. 'Can we talk?'

David stared at the ceiling fan, spinning lazily in the darkness. They'd already talked. They'd talked for hours, for days, for weeks. They'd talked until the words lost meaning, until 'I'm sorry' sounded like 'I surrender' and 'I love you' felt like an apology. The breakup had been less like a moment and more like erosion—the slow wearing down of something beautiful until it was unrecognizable.

He got up, went to the kitchen, and peeled an orange. His mother used to cut them into segments for him when he was sick, arranging them on a glass plate like a sunburst. He ate it standing over the sink, juice running down his chin, not bothering with a napkin. Some messes you don't clean up right away.

The iPhone screen illuminated: 'I'm outside.' David looked out the window and saw her car parked under the streetlamp, that familiar dent in the bumper from the time she'd backed into a mailbox during her residency year. He remembered how they'd laughed about it later, how she'd cried first, then laughed, then ordered Thai food and they'd eaten it on the floor of her apartment with plastic forks.

Some things, like baseball and vitamin deficiencies and relationships, follow rules you can't always see until you're halfway through the game. David opened the front door.