The Vitamins We Swallow
The third bottle of supplements sat on Sarah's kitchen counter, a colorful arrangement of promises in capsule form. Vitamin D for the dark winters, B-complex for energy she never felt, magnesium for the sleep that never came. Her friend Elena had recommended them all, each with a clinical precision that made Sarah feel like a failing experiment.
"You'll thank me later," Elena had said over drinks that neither of them really enjoyed anymore. They were forty now, the age where conversations turned from dreams to optimizations, from "what if" to "how to maintain."
Sarah swallowed her vitamins with lukewarm coffee, watching her husband move through the kitchen like a ghost in his own house. Mark hadn't been the same since the layoff two years ago. The job applications had stopped somewhere around month six. Now he just existed—a domestic zombie in sweatpants and a declining t-shirt, watching reality television with eyes that saw nothing.
"Have you seen my keys?" Mark asked, not really asking.
"By the door," she said, not really answering.
She'd started calling him that in her head: her zombie. Not the movie kind with the flesh-eating and the gore, but the slow kind. The one that happens to people who've been hollowed out by disappointment and incremental defeats. The kind you have to live with because leaving would mean confronting something larger than loneliness.
At work, Sarah's colleague Greg still sent her memes from 2015. He was dead inside too, but he made up for it with an elaborate routine of cold plunges and nootropics. He'd recommended her current stack of vitamins with the zeal of the recently converted.
"It's all about optimization," he'd told her in the breakroom, which smelled of stale coffee and quiet desperation. "We're just biochemical machines, right? Tune the machine, fix the output."
She'd believed him for six months. Six months of swallowing promises that her life could be optimized into something better. Six months of watching Mark become more zombie, watching Elena's marriage crumble over text message confessions, watching Greg get another promotion he didn't deserve.
The irony wasn't lost on her: she was taking vitamins to stay alive in a life that wasn't really living. She was the one taking supplements to prolong something she didn't actually enjoy.
That morning, Sarah stood at the counter with her vitamin bottles arranged like little soldiers of hope. She picked up the vitamin D, the B-complex, the magnesium, and tipped them all into the trash. The plastic bottles made a hollow sound as they landed.
She grabbed her keys. "I'm going for a walk," she told Mark, who didn't respond.
The fresh air hit her lungs—unmediated, unoptimized, real. For the first time in years, Sarah breathed in and thought: *this is what oxygen actually feels like.*