The Vitamins We Swallow

The bear was dead when I found it. Not the majestic kind from documentaries—a bloated, rotting thing beside the dumpster where my friend had been living. I hadn't seen Elias in six years, not since the night he told me he was done 'bearing' other people's expectations and walked out of his own engagement party.

His apartment smelled of cat piss and abandonment. Three cats—emaciated, watchful—slid between my legs as I stepped over vitamin bottles lined up like soldiers on the kitchen counter. B12, D3, zinc, magnesium. The vitamins of someone trying to resurrect themselves from the inside out.

"You came." Elias sat in the dark, his skin the color of something that had forgotten the sun. He looked like a zombie, but not the movie kind—the real kind that happens when you stop living and start merely existing. The corporate job had eaten him, he'd told me once. I hadn't understood then that some hungers aren't metaphorical.

"Your sister called," I said, sitting on a crate because he'd sold his furniture. "She's worried."

He laughed, dry and papery. "She thinks I'm depressed. She sends me those vitamins. Like they can fix what's missing."

"What is missing, Eli?"

He looked at me, and I saw it then—the same thing I'd seen that night he left. The terrible clarity. "The parts of me that could still feel surprised. The parts that could still be hurt. You remember how we used to talk about changing everything? About how we'd never become them?" He gestured vaguely toward the window, toward the world outside. "I did it. I became nothing instead."

One of the cats jumped onto his lap, and I noticed the tremor in his hand as he stroked its fur. The vitamins on the counter glinted in the sliver of light from the window—hundreds of them, like a promise he kept making to a version of himself that no longer existed.

"The bear outside," I said softly. "It's been dead a while."

"I know," Elias said, his voice cracking. "I keep waiting for someone else to notice."

And I understood then that he wasn't the zombie—he was the one who'd woken up while the rest of us kept walking. The vitamins weren't for him. They were for the cat. He was still feeding something alive, even if it wasn't himself anymore.