What We Swallow

The bottle of prenatal vitamins sat on her nightstand for three months before she finally opened it. Maria had been tracking her cycle on an app that sent cheerful notifications she'd stopped reading, while David continued to take his daily fish oil supplements with the regimented precision of someone who believed that if you just did everything right, the universe would cooperate.

They'd stopped having sex with any intentionality around month six. Now it was just something that happened between scrolling Instagram and falling asleep to podcasts about other people's perfect lives.

"My palm feels weird," David said one morning, staring at his hand like it belonged to a stranger. "The lifeline looks shorter than it used to."

Maria rolled over. "You're forty-two, David. The lines are just settling."

"No, I mean—" He held it out to her. "Do you think palm readers know something we don't? About timing? About what's worth waiting for?"

She almost laughed. Instead she kissed his palm, which was damp with that perpetually anxious sweat he'd developed since they started trying. "They know that people will pay to hear what they already suspect."

That afternoon, she went running for the first time in years. Not jogging—running. Like something was chasing her, or maybe like she was chasing something herself. Her lungs burned in a way that felt honest. The supplements and vitamins and ovulation strips and carefully timed intercourse all felt like such elaborate props, like they were performing fertility rather than experiencing it.

When she got back, breathless and sweat-soaked, David was sitting on the floor with all the bottles spread out between them: vitamins, supplements, CoQ10, maca root, the prescription prenatal vitamins she'd finally started taking. The plastic orange pharmacy bottles and white supplement containers formed a small city of failed promises.

"I stopped taking them," he said simply. "The vitamins. The ones that supposedly help with sperm count."

She looked at the empty bottle in his hand. "When?"

"Two months ago. I just couldn't swallow another pill that might not work."

Maria sat beside him on the hardwood floor and took his hand. Both their palms were damp now. "Maybe we're not running out of time," she said. "Maybe we're just running toward something else."

He leaned his head on her shoulder, and for the first time in a year, they sat without tracking anything—no cycles, no supplements, no predictions in the lines of their hands. Just the quiet understanding that some things can't be manufactured, only lived through.