Bear Country

The spinach was stuck between your teeth when you said you loved me for the last time. I remember thinking: should I tell you? Should I lean across the diner table and spare you this tiny humiliation? But I didn't. I watched you chew, watched the green fleck flash with each syllable, and said nothing. That's when I knew.

Three years later, I'm standing in the frozen aisle of a Wegmans in Ohio, my iPhone vibrating with work emails I'll never answer, when I see you.

You look tired. Not the good kind—not the satisfied exhaustion of a long hike or a long night. The other kind. The zombie kind. Eyes slightly glassy, movements deliberate, like you're reminding your limbs how to work.

I almost call your name. Instead, I study your hands. They're empty now. No wedding ring. The bear tattoo on your forearm—spray-painted on during that reckless week in New Orleans—is faded to a ghost. I'd traced that bear with my tongue more times than I could count. I'd whispered stories into the soft skin of your inner elbow.

The spinach incident had been early. Before I knew about your mother. Before the drinking started in earnest. Before you'd wake me at 3 AM, eyes wide, vibrating with some terror you couldn't name. You'd pace the apartment like a caged animal, and I'd lie there feeling useful, feeling needed—thinking love was about being the person someone called when the darkness got too loud.

I was twenty-four. I didn't know yet that sometimes you can't be the cure. Sometimes you're just another person watching.

Your cart has a rotisserie chicken, a bottle of wine, a bag of frozen spinach. My stomach turns over.

You reach for something on a high shelf. Your shirt rides up. I see it: the new tattoo on your ribs, peeking out from under cotton. A bird, maybe? Or a fish? Something that flies or swims away.

Good, I think. Good for you.

My phone buzzes again. A Slack notification from my boss: urgent request. The same man who laid me off three months ago, then offered me my job back at half pay. I feel like a zombie too. We're all zombies, really, shambling through fluorescent-lit aisles, pretending we know what we're doing, pretending the earth won't swallow us whole or we won't swallow ourselves first.

You turn. Our eyes meet.

For a second, I see it—flash of recognition, maybe, or just someone who looks familiar in this strange place where we buy food to keep living.

Then you turn back to your cart. You push it toward the checkout, wheels squealing, and I let you go.

The spinach in my own cart looks absurdly green. Impossible. Hopeful, somehow.

I pull out my phone and delete the Slack app. Then I buy the spinach and drive home, where I boil it until it's soft, until it's something I can swallow.