Vitamin D and Other Deficiencies

The cat had been dead for three months when Elias finally threw himself into **running**. Not jogging — that would imply some leisurely pursuit of wellness. This was desperate, midnight pavement-pounding, his lungs burning in the cold air, trying to outpace the silence of his apartment. His therapist called it 'processing grief.' Elias called it the only time his brain stopped screaming.

He'd met Sarah at the **padel** court. She'd been wearing those ridiculous skirt-shorts, serving with a ferocity that intimidated him. 'You're too tense,' she'd said, leaning against the net, sweat dripping down her neck. 'Like you're waiting for something terrible to happen.' She wasn't wrong. They'd played weekly for six months before she mentioned the **vitamin** D deficiency that had been making her bones ache. 'My body's literally forgetting how to be in the world,' she'd laughed over drinks that felt too much like a date. 'Sometimes I think we're all just walking around with cracks we can't see.'

That night, Elias cooked **spinach** for the first time since the funeral. It wilted in the pan, collapsing into itself, and he found himself crying over something so goddamn mundane as greens. The cat used to sit on the counter, watching him cook with those judgmental yellow eyes. Now the counter was just a counter. Sarah had texted: 'You okay?' He didn't know how to explain that cooking had become an archaeological dig, every ingredient unearthing some memory he wasn't ready to excavate.

The next morning, Sarah found him at their usual court time, but he wasn't holding a racquet. He was sitting against the fence, knees pulled to his chest. 'I can't do this anymore,' he said, and she thought he meant the game. 'No — not us. The pretending I'm not completely hollowed out by this.' She sat beside him in the dawn light, and for the first time in three months, he didn't need to run away from his own body. 'That's okay,' she said. 'Cracks are how the light gets in, right?' It was a terrible cliché, but coming from someone whose own bones were literally forgetting themselves, it felt like prophecy.