Vitamin Sea and Strays

The ocean stretched before Elena like a promise she couldn't keep—endless, indifferent, and cold. She sat on the balcony of the beachside rental, nursing a hangover that felt like judgment rather than consequence. The **water** below churned gray-green, each wave a reminder that nature continued without her.

Her phone buzzed. Mark. Again. Forty-seven messages since Tuesday, each one a variation of "please" or "I'm sorry" or "come home." She'd stopped reading them. The divorce papers sat on the coffee table like a dead thing.

A scraggly calico **cat** appeared at the sliding glass door, mewling with the practiced desperation of an animal that knew how to work a crowd. Elena opened the door and the cat wound through her legs, leaving orange fur on her black dress. "Yeah, me too," she said, scratching behind its ears.

She'd come here to write—the great American novel she'd been threatening to produce since her early thirties. Now she was forty-five, and the only thing she'd produced was a credit card balance and a steadily diminishing tolerance for bullshit. The **vitamin** supplements she took each morning—D for bones, B for energy, iron for blood—felt like she was trying to compensate for something no pill could fix.

The **palm** trees that lined the property swayed in the wind, their fronds like tired fingers. She'd always associated palms with paradise, but up close, they looked messy and unkempt, trunks scarred from fallen fronds, coconuts thudding to the ground like rotten thoughts.

At dinner, she met a man who'd lost his wife to cancer three years ago. He told her about the cabin in the woods where they'd lived, how he still woke up reaching for her. "Grief," he said, "is like a **bear** that hibernates in your chest. You think it's gone, and then it wakes up hungry."

They didn't sleep together. They sat on the beach and drank whiskey from plastic cups while he showed her pictures of his wife. Elena found herself crying—not for Mark, not for herself, but for the way love could persist like that, animal and enduring.

"Do you think it gets easier?" she asked.

He finished his drink. "No. But you get better at carrying it."

The cat was gone when she returned to the rental. The waves continued their eternal assault on the shore. Elena picked up her phone, deleted Mark's messages unread, and opened a blank document. The cursor blinked like a heartbeat.

She began to write.