The Wellness Protocol
The morning ritual never changed: vitamin D3 with breakfast, B-complex at lunch, magnesium before bed. Elias arranged them in his palm like pharmaceutical sacraments, each pill a promise that this time, he'd feel different. At 42, he'd accumulated more supplements than ambitions.
"You're coming to padel tonight, right?" Marcus asked, not really asking. Elias's phone buzzed — an iPhone notification from some wellness app reminding him to hydrate. He swiped it away without looking.
"Wouldn't miss it," Elias lied, watching his reflection in the office window. His father had died at 45. Heart attack. The same age Elias was rapidly approaching.
The padel court was enclosed in glass, like an aquarium where middle-aged men pretended they weren't drowning. Elias played mechanically, his racket meeting the ball with a satisfying thwack that vibrated through his wrist — the only thing that felt real anymore. Marcus shouted something about a startup pitch, about optimizing his sleep cycle, about the vitamin-infused water he'd imported from some Scandinavian company.
Afterward, they sat in the locker room, towels around their waists, comparing bloodwork like it was sports statistics. "My vitamin D levels are finally optimal," Marcus said, somehow making it sound like an achievement. "You should try this new brand."
Elias checked his phone again. A text from his ex-wife: "The kids are asking about you." Another from his boss: "Can we discuss the restructuring tomorrow?" A wellness notification: "Time for your evening supplements."
He stood in the locker room surrounded by men who had everything, popping vitamins they didn't need, playing games that didn't matter, phones glowing with messages from people they'd failed to love properly. The glass walls reflected them back at themselves — desperate, contained, desperately trying to optimize a life that had already happened.
Elias swallowed his magnesium pill dry. Tomorrow, he told himself. Tomorrow he'd call his children. Tomorrow he'd quit the job that was eating him alive. Tomorrow he'd stop arranging his life in capsule-sized portions.
His iPhone lit up with another reminder: "You're 73% of your daily hydration goal."
He deleted the app. Then he sat on the bench and cried, quietly, while Marcus texted about their next match.