Vitamins for the Living

Maya found me in the kitchen at 5 AM, staring at the vitamin sorter like it contained the meaning of life. Twelve compartments, twelve colors, twelve false promises.

"You look like shit," she said, which is why Maya is my friend. She doesn't do the fake optimism that everyone else at the firm wraps themselves in.

"I'm optimizing," I said, though the word tasted like ash. "B12 for energy. D for mood. Magnesium for—"

"For the fact that you haven't slept since the merger announcement?"

She poured coffee, black, and slid it across the counter. We'd been swimming together twice a week for three years, ever since she found me crying in the office gym after my divorce. Dawn swimming, she called it. No makeup, no small talk, just the ocean and whatever truth needed saying.

"Richard's making me present the layoffs tomorrow," I said finally.

Maya's coffee mug paused halfway to her mouth. "He's the VP. You're a director. This is his bull to take."

"He says I need 'leadership visibility.'"

"He says a lot of things. Remember when he called you 'overly emotional' for caring that Susan's mom died?"

I swallowed three vitamins with tap water. They felt like small stones.

"I can't do it, Maya. I can't look those people in the eye and tell them their lives are being rewritten by some algorithm in a spreadsheet while Richard talks about 'synergies' at the holiday party."

"Then don't."

"I have a mortgage. I have—"

"You have a soul," she said quietly. "Somewhere under all that corporate armor you've been welding on since January. Remember how you felt after your mom died? Like you were moving through water, everything muffled and distant? That's how you look every day now. Like you're already grieving your own life."

"I'm fine. I just need—"

"You look like a zombie, Elena. You're taking handfuls of pills to sustain a version of yourself that hates what she's become. Those vitamins aren't for the living. They're for something that's trying to pass itself off as alive."

The truth of it landed between us like a heavy thing.

"So what," I said, "I quit? Just like that?"

"We go swimming first. Then you decide."

The ocean was coal-dark when we got there, January wind cutting through everything. No one else was on the beach. We waded in until the water hit our waists—sudden shocking cold that left no room for lies.

"Just float," Maya said. "Let it hold you."

I leaned back, salt water filling my ears, the swell lifting me like something fragile and precious. The vitamins sat heavy in my stomach, twelve small stones I'd been carrying for months. Underneath them, something opened up—a hollow space I'd been refusing to feel.

I cried there in the Atlantic, letting the waves take whatever needed taking.

When I walked out of Richard's office an hour later, resignation letter unsigned but still trembling in my pocket, Maya was waiting by the elevators. She didn't ask what happened. She just tilted her head toward the parking lot.

"Still swimming on Tuesday?"

"Yeah," I said. "I think I finally am."