The Vitamin Season

The iPhone sat on the marble countertop, screen glowing with notifications. Sarah's phone. I'd only meant to check the time, but when I tapped the screen, it unlocked—she'd given me her password years ago, back when we shared everything.

What I saw stopped me cold. The Instagram grid was all golden-hour yoga poses and açai bowls, but the notifications underneath told a different story: pharmacy reminders, therapist appointments, a debt collector.

I looked at the vitamin bottles lined up by the sink—Vitamin D, B-complex, magnesium, ashwagandha, a dozen promises in amber and white plastic. Sarah swore by them. The supplements, she said, were why she glowed. Why her skin was perfect, why her energy was infinite, why her life was #blessed.

The reality was in those notifications.

We'd been friends since college, since the swim team. We used to do laps together at dawn, cutting through cold water while the campus slept, our arms moving in synchronized rhythm. That swimming was real. The cold shock of it, the silence, the way our bodies moved through something elemental and honest.

Now she swam in something else—curated light, filtered moments, the endless scroll of other people's lives. The vitamins weren't nutrition. They were currency in the economy of wellness she sold to her followers. $47 for her morning routine. $89 for her supplement stack. A whole life monetized, down to the supplements she probably didn't even take.

The cable box in the living room flickered. We were supposed to be watching a movie, but Sarah was in the bathroom again, probably fixing her already-perfect face. The HDMI cable connected her laptop to the TV, streaming her own content back to her—an infinite loop of herself.

I heard the toilet flush, the sink run. She'd be back any second.

The notifications blurred: a mental health crisis line subscription, a second pharmacy, a credit card declined notification. Depression wasn't photogenic. Anxiety didn't sell sponsored posts.

The bathroom door opened.

"Everything okay?" she asked, all teeth and foundation.

I locked the phone and set it back on the counter. "Fine. Just checking the time."

She picked it up, scrolled without looking, the gesture so practiced it was muscle memory. "Movie's buffering. Guess the cable's acting up again."

"Yeah," I said. "Buffering."

She sat beside me on the couch, her thigh pressed against mine, her Vitamin D perfume mixing with the scent of everything she wasn't saying. I thought about the swim team, about cold water and honest breath and moving through something real.

"Remember," I said, not meeting her eyes. "Remember when we used to swim laps? Before all this?"

Sarah paused. For a second, the curated smile slipped.

"Yeah," she said softly. "Before I became... this."

On screen, the movie finally caught up—a woman standing alone on a beach, beautiful and lonely, caught between the tide and the shore, neither one place nor the other. Buffering between worlds.

Sarah's hand found mine in the dark. Her palm was cold. Her grip was tight. Behind the vitamins and the filters and the golden-hour posts, my friend was still in there somewhere, swimming against a current I'd never really understood.

I squeezed back. The movie played on. We didn't speak of what I'd seen. Some truths you unlock alone.