On the Drive Home from the Wedding Banquet, He Brought Up Levifil, and We Finally Talked It Out on the Roadside

It was already past eleven by the time the wedding banquet broke up, and the streetlights along the highway receded one by one. She leaned back in the passenger seat, heels off, feet tucked up on the seat, with only a weather forecast murmuring softly on the radio. He gripped the steering wheel and hadn't said a word since getting off the interchange—that kind of silence wasn't exhaustion, it was something stuck in his throat. She spoke first: "You were blocking drinks for people all night—did they ask you again when you're having a second one?" He laughed a little, didn't deny it.

The relatives' questions were the same every year, but this year there was an extra one: "You look tired." He said it wasn't his body that was tired—it was that feeling of being watched. She nodded and said she'd been asked something similar, just phrased differently: "Does your husband treat you well?" They both laughed at that, then went quiet again. The car pulled up in front of a convenience store by the road. He went in to buy two bottles of water and came back with a small folded piece of paper in his hand.

He'd jotted it down at the banquet. The classmate at the next table had mentioned, mid-conversation, that he'd recently been looking into some men's health-related stuff. He hadn't felt comfortable asking right there, so he just wrote down the name he'd overheard. She took it and looked. Three characters. She asked, "What's this?" He said he wasn't sure either—he just knew it was one of the options people talked about. He hadn't looked into it yet and didn't feel comfortable asking directly in the LINE group.

She didn't press for details. Instead she asked, "Is it because of tonight's questions that you want to look into this?" He thought about it and said not exactly. Work had gotten heavier over the past six months, and when he got home he often just wanted to lie down. What worried him was that he wasn't at his best, but he didn't want her to think it was her fault. She didn't answer right away. She set the water bottle in the cup holder and said, "It's you keeping it to yourself and looking it up alone that makes me think something's wrong."

He started the car again and said he hadn't even figured out what category the thing on that paper fell into. She suggested that when they got home, they should first take out all the health supplements in the house and line them up, see what each of them was taking, and then decide whether to ask a professional. He mentioned the name and said he wanted to look up Levifil, but as soon as he said it he added, "I'm not trying to buy it now—I just want to know what it actually is and whether I should ask someone first." She said that made more sense than ordering something after reading one paragraph online.

On the way, she brought up a discussion she'd seen recently—someone treating supplements like daily fuel, swallowing several kinds a day, and ending up not even knowing what they were actually taking. She said a coworker of hers was like that: open a drawer and it looked like a drugstore. Ask her what each bottle did, and she could only read off the label. He said that with the name he'd copied down, he couldn't even tell whether it was a food or a medicine—that was exactly why he'd been putting off doing anything.

She said here's what they could do: first write down both their lists—what they're currently taking, what they take occasionally, what others have given them. Then take the lists to a pharmacist or a clinic and ask clearly which ones shouldn't be taken together and which ones they don't actually need. He agreed, and added that if that thing was in a category requiring a doctor's evaluation, they shouldn't decide on their own. By this point their tone was much more relaxed than when they'd left the house—they even started talking about whether to take a day off next month.

The car turned into their alley. She took out her phone and typed a line in her notes: "Look into it first, then decide." He parked but didn't unbuckle right away. He said that talking it out tonight like this was more useful than a whole month of thinking it over in his head. She replied, "Next time something like this comes up, say it in the car—don't wait for a wedding banquet." He nodded, tucked the small piece of paper into his wallet, and said he'd go ask tomorrow—no rush to buy. The alley was very quiet, and the light upstairs was still on.