Everything We Couldn't Bear

The corporate retreat was Maya's idea. Therapy through teambuilding, she'd called it, pouring two fingers of whiskey into the hotel room's cheapest glasses. Now she sat by the pool at midnight, cigarette ember pulsing like a stopped heart, while I pretended sleep didn't feel like running toward a cliff edge.

Lightning fractured the sky—three seconds to thunder. The storm had been chasing us since Denver, or maybe since the miscarriage, or maybe since we stopped touching each other without alcohol involved.

"You're going to miss it," Maya said, exhaling smoke that the wind immediately seized. "The moment when it all could have been different."

I thought about the baseball tournament her father had taken me to, last time he acknowledged my existence before the dementia hollowed him out. How I'd borne eight innings in blistering heat, pretending to understand something that was just a bat against a ball, just this life against nothing, just us against gravity and time.

"There was never a moment," I said, and the words tasted like sacrilege. "There were just hours. Days. That thing we called a marriage."

She laughed—actually laughed—and stubbed out the cigarette on the concrete. "God, you're exhausting. Even now, when everything's already broken, you're still trying to be the one who saw it first."

Rain began falling, warm and violent. We didn't move. The pool rippled beneath the onslaught, distorting our reflections into something almost monstrous. I thought about bears hibernating through winters they might not wake from, about the evolutionary advantage of knowing when to sleep through darkness.

"Do you remember," she said, "when we were happy?"

I thought about baseball games, about mornings, about how we'd fucked on this exact hotel balcony three years ago, how she'd whispered something about forever against my neck like a prayer.

"No," I said. "But I remember when we didn't know we weren't."

She stood up, silk dress clinging to every place we'd failed each other. "I'm going inside. Don't follow me."

The lightning flashed again, and for one crystalline second, I saw everything: my wife, the pool, the rain like benediction, the absolute unremarkableness of this ordinary catastrophe.

I didn't follow. I sat there as the storm erased the difference between us and the darkness, until the rain washed away everything I couldn't bear to say.