The Vitamins We Swallow

Elara stood at her bathroom counter at 2 AM, staring at the amber prescription bottle. Vitamin D. The doctor said her levels were dangerously low, another consequence of working nights at the call center, another thing her body had forgotten how to do on its own. She dry-swallowed two capsules, chasing them with tap water that tasted like the pipes were slowly dissolving.

Her cat, Bast, wound around her ankles, purring like a small engine. Bast was the only living thing that saw Elara regularly anymore. Her mother's texts went unanswered for weeks. Her last relationship had ended eight months ago when Marcus said he couldn't compete with her grief for her father, as if mourning were a competition.

"You're lucky," she told Bast, scratching behind her ears. "You don't have to fake anything."

Elara's therapist suggested she find an activity. Something physical. Something that forced her out of her head. She'd chosen swimming at the 24-hour YMCA—partly because the water felt like amniotic fluid, partly because no one could see her cry underwater, and partly because at 3 AM, she had the pool to herself.

She drove through empty streets, the city's neon signs reflecting off wet pavement. The YMCA's fluorescent lights buzzed as she padded to the locker room in her flip-flops. The same elderly night attendant, Eugene, nodded from his desk. He always asked how she was doing. She always said fine.

The pool was a rectangle of suspended blue, chlorinated and still. Elara lowered herself into the water, gasping at the shock of cold against her skin. She began to swim, her strokes mechanical at first, then finding something like rhythm. Lap after lap, her body remembering what it was to move without purpose, without destination.

On her twelfth lap, something cracked open in her chest—not healing, exactly, but movement. The water held her. The vitamins would help her bones, but this was helping something else. She thought about Marcus, about her father, about the way she'd been moving through her life like she was underwater without knowing how to swim.

Elara floated on her back, staring at the high ceiling, at the fluorescent lights that looked like small, artificial suns. For the first time in months, she didn't want to be anywhere else. She could hear her own breathing, could feel her heart beating, could almost believe that all of it—the vitamins, the swimming, the lonely nights—wasn't about fixing herself. It was about learning to be with herself.

Bast would be waiting when she got home. Tomorrow, she'd call her mother. Tomorrow, she'd ask Eugene how he was doing instead. But tonight, she floated in the water, and for a moment, it was enough.