Market Forces

The bronze bull on your desk—paperweight from your first big bonus—gleams under the fluorescent lights of your corner office. You've always been the bull: charging forward, horns lowered, certain that momentum equals destiny. I've been the one bearing the weight of everything momentum couldn't fix: your late nights, my lonely ones, the silences that grew like tumors in our marriage.

"Bear market," you muttered last night, studying investment charts on your phone. The same phrase you used when I told you I wanted to leave therapy, when I confessed I wasn't sure I loved you anymore. Your palm pressed against my thigh—sweaty, absent, like you were touching furniture you'd grown tired of.

Now I'm at a tiki bar halfway across the country, nursing a drink I don't want, watching palm fronds silhouette against a sunset that reminds me of blood oranges. The fortune teller at the pier told me my palm shows "great changes coming." She didn't specify who'd bear the cost.

You think I'm at a spa weekend. You think I'll come back softened, malleable, ready to accept your version of happiness: promotions, bigger houses, children we'll raise the way your firm raises profits. But the bull in you never learned that some markets don't recover. That some assets, once devalued, stay that way.

I trace the condensation on my glass, remembering how you'd cry during market downturns—those rare, pathetic moments when your bullish confidence failed. I always held you then. Always bore your vulnerability like it was precious, rare.

It wasn't. It was just you being human.

The bartender asks if I want another. I shake my head. My flight leaves in two hours. You'll wake up to an empty bed, a note that says nothing you can't already read in the palm of your own hand: some investments just don't yield returns.

Outside, the palm trees sway in a wind that's finally picking up. I walk toward it, feeling lighter than I have in years.