Vitamins for a Dead Marriage

The vitamins sat on the counter, a row of orange promises she'd stopped caring about three months ago. Jenna's prenatal vitamins, untouched since the second miscarriage.

I stood there, coffee in hand, feeling like the walking dead—another corporate zombie shuffling through his morning routine. My career as a regional manager for a company that sold overpriced supplements was a pyramid scheme in everything but name. I'd spent fifteen years climbing, only to realize the view from the top was just more emptiness.

Buster, Jenna's golden retriever, nudged my leg with his wet nose. He was the only thing left of us, the only living thing that still needed something from me.

"You hungry too, buddy?"

We ended up at the lake at dawn, the only time I could breathe anymore. I stripped to my boxers and dove in, the cold water shocking me into something like feeling. Buster paddled beside me, his golden fur plastering against his muscular frame.

Swimming parallel to the shore, I watched the sun crest over the water, turning the surface into shattered gold. Somewhere out there was a pyramid of grief I kept trying to drown: the children we'd never have, the wife I couldn't make stay, the life that looked perfect from the outside but was hollow as a shell.

Jenna had said I was emotionally vacant, a zombie husband who'd forgotten how to be alive. Maybe she was right. But here, in the water with Buster diving at imaginary fish, I felt something real. Not hope—hope was for people who still believed in pyramids.

Just this: the cold, the dog, the morning sun, and the vitamins waiting on the counter like tiny orange accusations of everything I'd failed to fix.