The Vitamins We Swallow

Marcus stood at the bathroom counter, the plastic **vitamin** bottle rattling in his hand. His father's voice echoed in his head: *You are what you eat, son. Even the pills.* The old man was gone six months now, and Marcus still couldn't decide if he was mourning the man or the version of himself that had existed in his father's presence.

The corporate merger had been approved yesterday. Three years of his life, grinding toward something that felt less like achievement and more like survival. His boss had called him into the office, dropped that word—**bull**shit—like it was wisdom. "Sometimes you gotta call **bull** on the whole circus," she'd said, popping a handful of supplements. "Doesn't mean you leave. Just means you know what it is."

He turned on the faucet. **Water** rushed over his hands, cold and shocking. He'd met Elena at a company retreat near the lake last summer. They'd stood waist-deep in **water** at midnight, drunk on wine and the impossibility of whatever this was between them. She was married. He was lonely. It was the kind of messy that didn't resolve itself, just accumulated like sediment.

"You **bear** the weight," she'd told him last week, her fingers tracing the scar on his shoulder. "That's what people do. They **bear** it until it breaks them or becomes them."

Marcus looked at himself in the mirror. The lines around his eyes had deepened. He was forty-two, and the future felt less like a horizon and more like a narrowing corridor. The **vitamin** D his doctor prescribed sat next to his father's old stash of supplements—chromium, zinc, things promised to extend a life that had already ended.

He poured the **water** into a glass, watching the surface settle. Then he swallowed the pill. Some days you called **bull** on the lie. Some days you just **bore** the weight. And some days, you took your **vitamins** and prayed for enough time to figure out which was which.