Vitamins for Grief

The fluorescent kitchen hummed with silence as I stared at the amber vial Marcus had placed on the counter. Another vitamin supplement, another attempt to fix what couldn't be fixed. He thought grief could be cured with holistic remedies and protein shakes, as if loss were merely a deficiency that could be supplemented away.

"You need to take care of yourself," he'd said, pressing the bottle into my palm after dinner, his fingers lingering too long. "Clara would want that."

The mention of her name was a weight I had to bear every single day. My best friend since college, gone six months now. And here I was, still swimming through the wreckage of her life—staying in her guest room, sleeping on her high-thread-count sheets, watching her husband move through their perfect kitchen like a ghost haunting his own house.

I turned the vitamin bottle in my hands. The label promised wellness, vitality, renewal. Everything I couldn't feel anymore.

"Marcus," I said, his name tasting like ash in my mouth, "I can't keep doing this."

He looked up from his coffee, eyes dark and knowing. There was something between us now—something that had been growing in the space Clara left behind. A friendship stretched too thin, transformed by shared grief into something else entirely. Something we both recognized but refused to name.

"Me neither," he whispered, and in that moment, the kitchen's harsh fluorescent light seemed to dim around us.

I set the vitamins on the counter—clink, like glass breaking—and walked toward him. And for the first time in six months, I let myself stop swimming against the current and simply drown.