The Weathering of Us

I found the bottle of vitamins in the medicine cabinet—the ones you always took religiously, even as everything else between us was falling apart. Two years after the divorce, and they're still there, expiration date looming like a deadline I keep ignoring.

The afternoon I came back to pack the rest of my things, you weren't home. I told myself I was just running errands, just getting it over with, but the truth was I wanted to see the old baseball field where we met. Twenty years of memories clustered around that place—the summer we spent entire afternoons at the pool, the way you'd hold my hand during lightning storms, claiming you could feel the electricity in the air before it struck.

I drove past the field on my way out of town. The lights were on even though no one was playing. I remembered you standing at home plate, explaining how the geometry of the game was actually about hope. 'The best hitters fail seven times out of ten,' you'd said, 'but they keep swinging.' That was your philosophy for everything, including us.

The pool where we'd spent countless summer nights was drained now, cracked concrete where teenagers had carved their names into the deck. I could almost see us there, young and certain that love was enough armor against whatever the world threw at us. We were wrong, of course. Love isn't armor. It's the thing that needs protecting.

Lightning cracked the sky as I reached the highway, sudden and brilliant, illuminating everything for a split second before plunging the world back into darkness. I thought about the vitamins sitting in your cabinet—orange-shaped promises of health and longevity, neither of which had saved us. How strange that we can take precautions for our bodies but none for our hearts.

I swallowed one of your expired vitamins before driving away. Maybe I wanted something of yours inside me one last time. Maybe I just needed to feel like I was finally taking care of myself, however backwards the method. The storm broke fully as I merged onto the interstate, rain washing away whatever was left of the life we built together, leaving only the road ahead and the certainty that some things, once broken, stay broken forever.