The Vitamin D Deficiency of Memory

The pool had been drained for weeks, a concrete wound in the backyard where we once argued about mortgage rates and which brand of detergent to buy. Sarah had loved that pool—loved the way her body moved through water, weightless and silent, swimming laps while I watched from the patio, nursing a drink I couldn't quite taste.

Now the house is empty. Sarah left in October, taking the dog—a neurotic golden retriever named Buster who'd developed separation anxiety whenever I opened the front door. I kept the house, the mortgage, the gradually decaying backyard. Kept the goldfish pond too, though the pump died three weeks ago and the water's turned a murky green that reminds me of hospital walls.

The goldfish are still alive somehow. Orange flashes in the murk, resilient creatures that don't seem to notice their world has gone stagnant. I feed them every morning, sprinkling flakes that float on the surface before slowly sinking. Sometimes I stand there for minutes, watching them rise and fall, thinking about how Sarah used to say we were like that—floating, waiting for food, not realizing we'd stopped swimming anywhere.

"You need to take your vitamin," she'd say every morning, holding out the small white pill. Vitamin D, she called it, for my mood. For the darkness that settled in my chest around 3 PM every day, the same way shadows lengthened across the patio. I took them without complaint, without really believing they worked.

I still take them. The bottle sits on my nightstand, next to the glass of water that's always there, condensation marking the passage of hours. Yesterday I stood at the drained pool's edge and realized I couldn't remember the last time I'd felt anything beyond a dull ache, the kind that doesn't hurt exactly but reminds you, constantly, that something is missing.

The goldfish broke the surface then—a ripple, a flash of orange, a gasp of air. And I thought: maybe Sarah was right. Maybe I'm just swimming in circles, waiting for someone to remember to feed me. Maybe that's what love is, really—learning to notice when the water's gone stagnant, when you've stopped moving forward, when you're just floating, waiting for a vitamin that never actually worked.

I went inside and called the pool repair service. First step in months that felt like moving in any direction at all.