The Weight of Waiting

Maya stared at the coaxial cable snaking across her floor like a dead umbilical cord. Three weeks without internet had seemed like a noble experiment—digital detox, they called it—until the silence in her apartment started feeling less like peace and more like stagnation.

She'd taken to arranging her vitamins in elaborate patterns on the kitchen counter. Vitamin D for the artificial light she never saw. B-complex for stress she couldn't name. Magnesium for sleep that wouldn't come. The ritual gave her something to do between the hours of 2 AM and 4 AM when her brain insisted on replaying every conversation she'd had with Elena.

The message had been sitting in her drafts for seven days: "I saw that bear carving you made. Still on my shelf. Still makes me think of that trip."

But sending it meant bearing the weight of everything unsaid between them. The way their friendship had curdled somewhere between Elena's promotion and Maya's spiral of panic attacks and doctor visits. The vitamins were supposed to help. The journaling was supposed to help. The goddamned digital detox was supposed to help.

Maya's thumb hovered over the cable modem reset button. One click and she'd be connected again. One click and she could send that message. One click and she'd have to face whatever Elena sent back—or worse, what she wouldn't.

The bear carving had been a joke. Something Elena whittled during a weekend getaway they'd both been too anxious to enjoy. "It's a bear," Elena had said, "but it's also you. Fierce but pretending to be asleep." Maya had laughed then, back when laughter didn't feel like choking on something sharp.

She swept the vitamins into her palm. Thirty pills a day now. The doctor said they were safe. The internet said she was being paranoid. Elena would say—what would Elena say? That she needed to get outside? That she needed to stop self-diagnosing?

The cable sat there, patient as a serpent.

Maya pressed the reset button.

The lights flickered. Connection established. Her drafts folder opened, that message still waiting, still stupid, still the only thing that mattered.

"I miss you," she typed instead. "I'm tired of sleeping through everything."

She hit send before she could overthink it, before she could remember that vulnerability was the one vitamin she'd never been able to swallow.

Three dots appeared. Then: "I'm coming over. I have wine and I refuse to let you bear this alone."

The modem lights pulsed like a heartbeat restored.