The Vitamin Deficiency

The plastic bottle rattled as Mark shook two tablets into his palm. Vitamin D, the doctor had said. Vitamin B12 for energy. He swallowed them dry, standing in his kitchen at 7 AM, staring at the bowl of chopped papaya and spinach Elena had prepared before leaving for her yoga class.

They'd stopped eating together three months ago. The silence at breakfast had become too loud, so they'd quietly negotiated separate morning rhythms. Now he ate his superfood breakfast alone, the sweetness of papaya clashing with the bitter realization that he couldn't remember the last time they'd laughed at something that wasn't a television show.

"Mark?" Her voice from the doorway. "Did you forget? Padel at ten."

Padel. The new obsession Elena had developed with her colleague Greg from marketing. They'd formed a league, she said. It was good for networking, she said. Mark had nodded, pretending not to notice how her eyes lit up when she mentioned Greg's backhand.

"I'll be ready," he said, not meeting her eyes.

The padel court was enclosed in glass, like an aquarium for his suffocating marriage. Elena and Greg moved in sync, their laughter echoing as Mark fumbled his serve. He'd been running from this moment for months—literally running, five kilometers every morning, endorphins substituting for intimacy.

"You're distracted," Elena said during a water break, wiping sweat from her forehead. She smelled of coconut sunscreen and someone else's shampoo.

"Just tired."

"Greg says his wife started taking these new vitamins—" she began, but Mark cut her off.

"I'm already taking the fucking vitamins, Elena." The words came out harder than intended. She recoiled as if he'd thrown the racket at her.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

He looked at the papaya-colored walls of the court, at Greg hovering awkwardly by the net, at his wife who had somehow become a stranger he breakfasted beside. "It means I've been doing everything right. The vitamins, the spinach, the running. I'm fixing all the things I can fix. But some things, maybe some things just—"

"Just what?" She stepped closer, and for the first time in months, he saw something besides practiced efficiency in her expression. Fear. The same fear he tasted every morning with his supplements.

"Maybe some deficiencies aren't about what we're missing," he said quietly. "Maybe they're about what we've stopped making."

Greg cleared his throat. "I'll, uh, give you two a minute."

As he walked away, Elena's hand found Mark's. Her palm was sticky with papaya juice and sweat, and it was the most real thing he'd felt in months. "I haven't been running," she whispered. "I've been waiting for you to stop running so we could actually start."

The padel ball sat untouched in the corner of the glass enclosure. Somewhere in the distance, someone else was beginning their morning run, footfalls marking time against pavement. But Mark stood still, feeling her pulse against his thumb, thinking that perhaps he'd finally found something worth staying for.