The Vitamins We Swallow

The first week without her, I forgot to take my vitamins. The orange bottle sat on the counter where she'd left it, a small amber monument to our shared delusion that we could supplement our way out of unhappiness. I'd swallow them dry, no water, while she'd lecture me about absorption rates and stomach lining damage. She was always trying to optimize me.

Then came the night with the lightning storm—violence in the sky, our dog trembling between my feet on the hardwood floor. Barnaby wouldn't eat. He kept pacing to her side of the bed, pressing his wet nose into the empty pillowcase where her hair still lingered, faint and coconut-scented. I found myself doing the same thing that week: burying my face in her abandoned sweaters, inhaling until my lungs ached, like I could smoke her essence into my bloodstream.

The divorce lawyer asked about division of assets. I told her I didn't care about the house, the retirement fund, the car. I just wanted Barnaby. She'd taken him when she moved out, left a note about how she couldn't care for him properly in her small apartment, as if the dog was just another household chore she'd shed along with me.

I started leaving vitamins on her doorstep. A daily handful, scattered like birdseed across her welcome mat. It wasn't reconciliation. I just needed her to know that some habits persist even after the person who taught them is gone. The water soluble ones. The ones your body can't store.

Last Tuesday, I watched from my car as she swept them into the trash. Lightning struck somewhere behind her silhouette, illuminating the frame of her new boyfriend in the window. His hand on her shoulder. Her hair longer than she'd ever worn it for me.

I drove to the ocean afterward. Stood waist-deep in saltwater until my skin pruned, swallowing handful after handful of vitamins from the bottle I'd stolen back. Choking them down with the ocean. Letting the current take everything I couldn't carry anymore.

Some things you keep. Some things dissolve.