Vitamin Z

The alarm blares at 5:45 AM. Sarah rolls over, squinting at the orange prescription bottle on her nightstand—her daily vitamin D supplement, the only thing between her and bone-deep exhaustion. At 32, she shouldn't feel this ancient.

She swallows the pill dry, then laces up her running shoes. The predawn streets of Seattle are empty, her breath pluming in the cold air as she finds her rhythm. Three miles in, her phone buzzes against her hip. It's Mark: "Can we talk?"

She keeps running.

Mark had been everything—until the night he'd said, "I love you, but I don't think I'm in love with who we're becoming." Those words had hollowed her out more than three years of corporate burnout ever could.

At the office, Sarah moves through her day like everyone else: eyes glazed from blue light, consuming caffeine and vitamin-infused waters to sustain the pretense of wakefulness. They're all zombies, really—shuffling through open-floor plans, attending meetings that could have been emails, trading vitality for direct deposits and 401k matching.

Her therapist calls it "functional dissociation." Sarah calls it Tuesday.

That evening, she finds herself at Mark's door before she can talk herself out of it. He looks tired too.

"I'm still running," she says. "Literally and figuratively. From everything, including us."

He nods slowly. "I stopped taking my vitamins."

"What?"

"The supplements. The antidepressants. The things I thought would fix me. I realized I was running too—toward solutions that didn't require me to actually feel anything."

They stand there in his doorway, two exhausted people admitting they've been moving through life on autopilot. The zombie shuffle.

"I don't want to run anymore," Sarah says. "Even if it means facing what's actually wrong."

Mark steps aside. "Then come in."

Inside, on his coffee table, sits her missing vitamin bottle. She'd left it here three months ago. The irony isn't lost on either of them—sometimes what you need to feel alive again has been waiting for you to stop moving long enough to notice it.