The Vitamin Summer

Margaret sat by the apartment complex pool, the water shimmering like crushed glass in the July heat. At forty-seven, she'd finally quit the job that had been eating her alive for fifteen years—head of communications for a tech startup that promised to 'revolutionize connection' while systematically destroying her ability to feel anything at all.

Her iPhone buzzed against the lounge chair, a relentless heartbeat she couldn't quite bring herself to silence. Three missed calls from Mark. She'd told him she needed space, but space was hard to find when you carried your entire world in a six-inch rectangle of glass and aluminum.

She swallowed her vitamin D supplement with lukewarm seltzer, remembering the doctor's words about bone density and northern winters. How strange that the very sunlight she'd spent decades avoiding—躲ing in windowless offices, staring at screens—was now prescribed like medication.

The coaxial cable dangling from the apartment above swayed gently in the breeze, an umbilical cord to a world she wasn't sure she wanted to rejoin. She'd cancelled her cable package three days ago, another umbilical severed. The silence that followed had been terrifying at first. Now it felt like possibility.

A woman in her twenties—Margaret's age when she'd started at the company—sat two chairs over, typing furiously on her laptop, eyes darting between screen and phone, enslaved to the same machine that had hollowed Margaret out. Margaret wanted to warn her. Wanted to say: run, before you forget what it feels like to just exist.

Instead she closed her eyes and listened to the water lapping against the pool's edge, the distant hum of traffic, the apartment building settling in the heat. For the first time in years, her thoughts weren't a to-do list or crisis management plan or carefully crafted message.

Just water. Just light. Just the terrifying, glorious weight of being alive with nowhere else to be.

The phone buzzed again. She let it ring.